Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day

I just finished Joan Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis.

I've been reading it since last winter, and it has helped me tremendously. I actually can't emphasize enough how helpful it has been. There are many techniques for finding a way to get at your own process and it deals with practical and psychological difficulties.

The final two chapters, which I just tackled, are "Revising: The Second Draft and Beyond" & "The Best Dissertation is a Done Dissertation." They really helped me see that I'm in the final stretch and that it isn't easy. I need to pick up my pace now. I was surprised that she mentioned that you might feel like giving up at this stage. I thought I was crazy for feeling that way. 300 pages in and I want to bag it. But apparently it's a common feeling.

"When revising, what you're engaged in is closer to craft than it is to art, and if you keep at it long enough, you'll succeed without having to worry about inspiration."

"Revision requires stamina: you can't quit just because you're tired, or because you don't ever want to see one particular paragraph again, or because you hope the writing is OK, even though you know it isn't... But the biggest temptation for most people... is too quit too soon... it's also OK to be tired or bored, just so long as you keep working anyway."

And, most exciting to me of all:

"when you defend your thesis it will become much clearer to you that you own this work... This realization is an important private graduation, a psychological parallel to the public ceremony."

I cannot wait. I can almost taste it. I'm almost there.