A year after Day 45

I decided to write about my experience after I finally see things more clearly.

I stopped writing the daily logbook of my thesis writing process on day 21. It wasn’t a conscious decision or loss of motivation, but I finally found my groove in writing and I didn’t need extra motivation anymore. Looking back at it, I was done with writing more than half of the dissertation by that time, so in the remainder of the time, I mostly dealt with polishing the thesis. I decided to write a story now of how things played out eventually.

How long did it take?

In total, I spent 45 days on writing my dissertation. Though, this number is only valid when we solely concentrate on the dissertation. Much of the experimental work had already been written up in published and then-yet-unpublished manuscripts, which made it much easier to fill the blank paper with information — once you have a page that is not completely empty, the writer’s block is resolved easier and you can continue writing.

I also had every project (that is, each chapter) clearly planned out, knowing how I wanted to introduce the topic, how I wanted it to unfold, and I had all the figures and conclusions ready to be put in paper. Make sure, though, to keep your figures saved in a modifiable format as well — not only because of the typos that you realize an hour before printing your dissertation, but also you may decide to merge or separate some of them, and it is so much easier to do in a format that is easy to change.

I must also clarify that I have always been a fast writer — you can see it in my story “Let’s write a science article in two hours!”, but I believe that my short writing period has less to do with being a fast writer than with being organized when you write such a structured work as a dissertation.

What helped the most in the writing process?

This question can be answered in different ways: first and foremost, I had wonderful friends and colleagues that were willing to help me by giving me ideas when I was stuck, and gave harsh but necessary comments on parts that didn’t work for them. I specifically asked them to be reviewers and not friends when revising my work, as the referees would also approach the dissertation in such a way. Don’t be afraid of criticism! Even the seemingly most perfect works have been through serious criticism and self-evaluation before being published, and there is no reason for you to think that yours should be different. It’s OK not to see something that is obvious for others — when you plan the flow of a chapter, you do so based on all the knowledge you gathered while preparing for it, which knowledge might not be trivial for others.

The other thing that helped me a lot is forcing myself to be structured. For each chapter, latest when I sat down to write it, I prepared a slide show with all the figures and a couple of bullet points what I can see there, and in some cases, I even printed them to have the figures on my desk. Many of my chapters contained the discussion of vibrational spectra with a plethora of vibrational information, which needed a very systematic review before drawing conclusions, and sometimes the original order of the figures just didn’t make sense anymore. Believe me, it is much easier to spend an hour on such a document than rewriting a 20-something-pages-long chapter to fit a new line of thoughts.

How was the review process?

It was not easy. Like, at all. I had this plan originally that I would be done with the whole document by the middle of summer (before I went on holiday), which turned out to be as far from the truth as possible; I finished writing the last chapter just a couple of days before I submitted the whole document. I went for a parallel workflow: I asked my friends what is the latest deadline I can give them a chapter to review, and after I had all the information, I structured writing accordingly. I handed out one chapter per person in most cases, so that they don’t feel overwhelmed by a 200-pages-long document, and they could go a bit deeper in their comments. It was especially important to me that each chapter should stand as a whole story on its own and no information was missing for the reader to understand it, which was easiest to achieve in a way that every person gets one chapter only. When the first reviews came back, my break from writing consisted of implementing their suggestions. Thus, by the time I finished the draft of the very last chapter, I didn’t have to implement the comments into all the chapters, but I only had a couple of them left.

How did I feel after I submitted my dissertation?

Honestly, not much different than before. I think I still have not processed the fact that I finished it. I was particularly proud of myself for “ripping off the band-aid” and wrote the whole document in “one sitting” instead of prolonging the process that is inevitable either way. But by adhering to a very tight schedule, I got to enjoy a bit of summer (which, at the time I didn’t know was not going to be possible the following summer of 2020) without the thought of writing weighing on my shoulders, and I could also prepare myself for my coming job that I already had arranged for myself.

One last piece of advise

When I felt like I was in the zone and could write for hours more, I did not check the time — having the perfect momentum for writing is so rare, especially when you must write, that I decided to pull an all-nighter, sometimes even cancelling plans with my friends. They always understood, and so will yours. With such days, I could account for those when I couldn’t make myself write; it does no good for you to try to push yourself when in 3 hours all you can do is write two sentences and delete three. Treat yourself. As Tina Tran once wrote:

“Eat vegetables to be good to your body, but eat ice cream to be good to your soul.”