Stuck.

My chapter - my pride and joy a few weeks ago - is not going well. My supervisor said I need to define what makes preparators a group... what unifies this community, when all my data are about how different preparators' work and beliefs and skills are?
Crap.

While busy being stuck on this problem, I searched around my computer looking for... well, who knows what I was looking for, besides a few minutes of distraction. And I found it, in a poem I wrote last spring and forgot about. It had struck me then how the PhD students ahead of me talked about the way they write and how they GET themselves to write when they're stuck - they had very diverse, strange, individualized, "magic" methods. Now I need one!

A line at a time

Quick clicks, or long stares at a blank screen with a few tentative clacks

A line at a time

What makes your words come? What makes you “hot”? “on”? What “loosens your writing fingers”? Is it coffee or clouds or mornings or gin or deadlines?

You know what you want to say. Good thing there’s so much space to say it in.

The white plain stretches between the margins, limitless to the boundary of 80,000 words.

Unreachable? Better not to think about it. “PhDs write themselves”, they say – once you know enough.

5,333 lines. 762 paragraphs. Footnotes not included.

That’s enough to make a contribution to knowledge… right?