may easily get the feeling part-way through writing that you
have been thoroughly mistaken about where this best way lies,
and now have lost track of it entirely. Countering these setback
feelings entails taking a longer view of, first, the whole set of
stages involved in developing a professional text; and second,
the process of exposing it to consideration and debate by others.
Stages in the writing process
Don’t get it right, get it written.
James Thurber^5
Outlines can help, but not if you begin with them.
If you begin, instead, by writing down everything,
by spewing out your ideas as fast as you can type,
you will discover ... the fragments you have to
work with.
Howard Becker^6The major myth of the authoring process is the critical character
of breaking fresh ground, filling a blank screen or a blank page
de novo. An essential antidote is to recognize that this is only
a first stage in authoring, and not necessarily the key one for
the development of your argument. Authoring is a multi-stage
process and, as the quote from James Thurber above makes
clear, there are divergent rationales to go with these different
stages. The logic of a first draft is to make text where there was
none, to get something written, to get the elements you have
in play more or less defined, even if only in a preliminary way
and often in the wrong order. As your text grows you will also
necessarily lose some control over it. By the time a chapter is 30
or 40 pages long you cannot possibly hold its entire argument
in your head at one time. Nor can you even fully understand
what you have written or why the argument turned out as it
did. Rebuilding this mastery is a key element in the second
stage of the writing process, where you can follow through
a logic of organizing text in a coherent fashion. Building an
extended text will necessarily change your thinking. It will
make clear aspects of your own views that you could not have
136 ◆AUTHORING A PHD