Writing Like a Coward

I worried and sweated over my dissertation the most while I was avoiding it.  At dinner, at the movies, singing karaoke-- it loomed.  I hefted this 200-page boulder around (literally and metaphorically) for years as it poisoned my life.  I remember sitting down to a pleasant lunch with some old friends about six months into drafting.  One friend bravely inquired about my writing.  My (very mature) response was:
“I hate it.  I just HATE IT!”

That’s an exact quote.  I think a little spittle flew across the table and landed in my friend’s hot cider.  We were silent for a minute before she clarified,  “I was asking about your fiction.”

“Oh.  I’m really enjoying the draft process, thanks for asking.”  

Fiction has always been easier to write because it’s a story, not an argument.  Big arguments might flow from fiction writing, but it is under the surface, camouflaged by witty dialogue.  I’m not really known for being a debate person, which is kind of what academic writing is: polite arguing.  So every sentence of my dissertation was torture to write;  every single word choice-- utter agony.  So imagine my devastation when the first draft I sent to my advisor returned to me with a giant sticky note across the top page.  

DEAR RACHEL,  I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’RE SAYING.  ALL THE BEST.  DR. C

My advisor had waded through my dissertation like the valiant pedagog he is so there were plenty of other notes as well, but many of them were reiterations of that theme.  Question marks floated in the margins like sailors marooned at sea.  I slogged through another draft, then a third, but the question marks kept bobbing in the margins.  They haunted me.  Finally Dr. C and I had a long phone call  (THE long phone call, really), and somewhere near minute 50 it all clicked into place.  I understood the subtext that connected his comments.  

Stop being a coward.

I hadn’t written a dissertation.  I had-- somehow-- strung together two-hundred pages of words without saying anything at all.  In a way, it was a bit impressive.  The defense mechanisms in my brain decided (without my permission, it seems) that if I couldn’t be understood, I couldn’t be criticized by my dissertation committee.  I was writing in circles.  I erected sentences like fortress walls to protect myself from failure.  I planted gnarled thickets of qualifiers so no one (not even I) knew what was going on.  

I taught myself to write while rewriting my dissertation.  I learned that just because German philosophy is really great, you don’t ever want to write like a German philosopher.  Some of my hardest lessons were:

1. Have pity on your reader and break sentences down into smaller pieces.  
2. Replace gerunds with real nouns and verbs.
3. Don’t overuse words like “this” or “things” so your reader doesn’t have to ask “which ‘thing’ are we talking about?”
4. And, for the love of all that’s holy, use consistent metaphors.  

I have no idea why these simple habits are so hard for me to master.  Writing clear, concise sentences with less than fifteen clauses is something I still struggle with every time I sit down to write academic work.  My overwhelming fear that I cannot defend my opinion In writing has led me to a lifetime of bad habits.  The good news is, I’m working on it. And the happy byproduct is that by working on my opaque writing tendencies, I am working on my overall writing skills as well.  As usual, the “writing life” and the “regular life” are intertwined, and victory through hard work in one area of life will bring joy to the other.