It is a new year. It brings a hope that this might be the year in which the doctorate is completed, and a fresh determination to support that hope by getting on with things. The end is in sight. It is a long way off and there are several mountains to climb, but it is there away into the distance and the path is signposted.
I have spent the £10,000 that I had mentally allowed for the privilege of this study. I can’t say ‘budgeted’ because I never had it saved up to begin with, but have scrimped and saved over the last six years and had several periods of intermission when the funds simply weren’t there. And so there is a financial imperative to complete as well as an intellectual and practical one.
In January I redrafted the methodology chapter. And so far in February I have redrafted the introductory chapter. Both now represent a third draft (though I am on a fifth draft of the findings chapters).
The breakthrough is really that I finally feel as though I wouldn’t be embarrassed for anyone to read them. I would no longer crumble to dust if they were shared. It’s a long time since I began writing both, and the cringy, self-important sentences are largely gone. When they were written in those earlier days they weren’t intended to sound self-important, more to desperately establish a claim in territory that I found slippery and hostile - clinging on in a place that I didn’t think I deserved to be. They make uncomfortable reading in the drafting process but their removal begins to remove some of my anxieties. Having more or less a draft of the whole means that each rewrite achieves greater clarity and narrative coherence. And the fact that some passages haven’t been revisited for many months means that objectivity is achieved through that distance.
The rest of February will be devoted to the Literature Review, which is currently around 15,000 words. It needs a whole additional section as well as a further rewrite. The assurances from my supervisors that it would simply be a case of expanding the original Literature Review included in the proposal was a little removed from the reality. I have read more than a hundred further books and papers since that was submitted five years ago.
So, on I plod. The journey metaphor is annoying, and I have already overused it and mixed it up here, but it is a hell of a ride.
