So this is it: the home stretch. A little over a week from today, I will be handing in my thesis to my committee — and so I thought it might be appropriate, at this point, to share my process, with those who are curious, and my misery with those who currently share it.

I started the semester in good shape, with a complete first draft. My thesis advisor then suggested a schedule that involved getting a complete second draft more or less done by the end of October, which meant I had to average a minimum of 1,800 words a day of revision. I lost about three hundred hours of sleep and three years from my life expectancy in the process, but here’s the satisfying wedge of paper that resulted:

After that, for the last two or three weeks, my task has been to go through and tweak that second draft: shifting things around, developing gaps, and ruthlessly cutting the language (the words “trim”, “compress”, and “some work here” appear with heartbreaking frequency on my advisor’s marked up copy).

Anyway, to aid in said shifting around and gap-developing, I went through the second draft and did a Painteresque “cutting up” of the manuscript, using stickies to stand in for the actual pieces of paper. The result, below, hangs directly over my head as I sleep at night (my bedroom wall was the only one large enough to hold it):

If you’re curious, each column represents a chapter, and the vertical space between each one represents the relative weight of each section in that chapter; they’re also colour-coded: green for scenes, pink for narrative summary, yellow for flashbacks, and orange for some combination of the three. You may well be skeptical about the usefulness of all this, but it very handily reveals, for instance, that the first few chapters are dense and highly fragmented, and the middle few rely way too heavily on long sections of flashback and narrative summary.

So, finally, for the last two weeks, I have pretty much lived with my computer on my lap, wading through and fixing the numerous issues that still abound. Here’s my workspace:

Key things to note:

•One empty Lindt 85% dark chocolate box, and TWO (2!) empty pizza boxes.
•Blanket for warmth, security, absorption of tears, etc.
•Pile of lit journals in which my work has not appeared to alternately cause inspiration/despair.
•Scraps of paper freaking everywhere. (Living in a grad school apartment during thesis season is a little like being a hamster.)

Now, back to work. Good luck this week to all my fellow sufferers!

Tags:   Andrew · Emerson College WLP Department · writers' habits · writing processNo Comments