“Wow, you are the first PhD I’ve met who, after six years, is still enthusiastic about his topic.”
A founder said this to me two weeks ago, in a get-to-know call. Until that comment, I hadn’t realised that my enthusiasm is somewhat unusual at the phase I’m in. Many PhDs complain as they near the end.
It made me reflect. And then I thought: yes, I’m still engaged, and of course I am: my topic is such a fun problem.
Finding something you can really sink your teeth into is the superpower. I discovered mine by chance. But it was no accident: perseverance in writing created the conditions for it. So this post is a reflection on that writing, for anyone who feels lost at times.
Discovery, writing up, and the dark
Over the years, I have come to distinguish three modes of writing.
The first is discovery writing: you have a rough sense of where you want to go, and the writing itself teaches you what you actually want to say.
The second is writing-up writing: putting down what you already know, such as describing what a statistical table says. Important for the reader, but for me it generates nothing new. This mode is rarer than you’d expect: even when I think I am only writing up, I often discover something new.
And before both, there is a mode of not knowing where to begin. You sense there is something there, but everything is all over the place. There is no direction yet, and the creative leap has not happened.
Swimming in close-to-panic
That last mode was by far the hardest. Halfway through, I was completely lost, not knowing which direction to take. In PhD vocabulary, this is called swimming, I was told.
I analysed my dataset over and over again, but I just couldn’t see it. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. I went back to the literature, back to the data, back to the literature, hoping to find something that would give me a sense of direction. My supervisors and I met many times, and their message was consistent: keep going, this is normal, trust the process.
What eventually helped was writing out my story in full. In my qualitative coding software, I was labelling data, but the bigger arc was missing. It only started to come together when my Word document filled up.
And at some point, something clicked. I found my problem. But the light at the end of the tunnel was further away than I expected.
‘Boring’ kept me going
Even after discovering the core idea of my thesis—which I will not explain in this article because it deserves its own post—a lot of details needed to be fleshed out. Some of those turned out to take me into the dark again. Every chapter is another synthesis, and with every synthesis I am back in the mode of not knowing where to begin.
I can rely on the basic structures, like what a discussion or methodology section typically contains. But then I reverse outline what I have written, summarising each paragraph in a single line to see what I am actually saying, and I think: this is boring. We already know that idea. Not only is this nothing new; I wonder if it has value at all.
In hindsight, that dissatisfaction kept me going. This is a different kind of boring than writing-up writing. The writing-up is boring work; this is a boring result. During the data analysis, I had that feeling over and over: my current interpretation resembled something I had read before, already better described than I ever could. That friction primed me to look for something more interesting, whatever that was.
The true challenge of writing
The difficulty with writing is that it is not always clear which mode you are actually in. Sometimes you think you are writing up finalised thoughts, and then you discover something new. And vice versa.
What I developed over time is a better sense of which mode I am in. The reverse outline is my canary in the coal mine. When it only names what we already know, I am back in the dark. When a paragraph challenges me to be more precise, I am discovering.
So yes, I am still enthusiastic about my topic. Because I know that in the final writing up, I will still discover new things that tickle my brain the right way. That keeps me going.
PS: I often use the prompt below to reverse outline my drafts. It’s a great starting point for reviewing anything you write.
Can you reverse outline the pasted text. Scrutinise the text for distinct arguments, and output them in a list in chronological order. For each argument, with an indented bullet, rate it for clarity and logic (1/10). With another indented bullet, give suggestions of how to improve it, with (necessary/nice to have) behind it.
This post was the greatest micro-distraction while writing for my Msc. thesis
Reverse outlining is a super writing hack.
However, I do it by hand first, then maybe with assistance. It forces you to clarify and reorganize thoughts.
It also makes it easier to cut paragraphs that aren't pulling the load.