But the off-putting and obsessional character of the doctorate in
general, especially when a ‘big book’ thesis is involved, probably
more than makes up for this age-protection effect.
Trouble has no necessary connection with
discouragement – discouragement has a germ of its
own, as different from trouble as arthritis is from a
stiff joint.
F. Scott Fitzgerald^25
Some people misinterpret what writer’s block is.
They assume you can’t think of a single thing. Not
true. You can think of hundreds of things. You just
don’t like any of them.
Neil Simon^26Part of the positive help that comes from exposing your text
to a fairly wide range of commentators, from family or partners
to supervisors, fellow students and wider seminar audiences, is
that it can help counteract the development of disabling private
standards of criticism. Going out into the professional world at
conferences is also generally encouraging for PhD students,
since it tends to show you that standards there cover quite a
broad range. Doctoral researchers normally cannot match the
sweep of large-scale confirmatory research projects or the the-
matic ambition of major authors. But in terms of doing well-
based and consistently-pursued research many PhD students
can match or outclass most academics doing conference papers.
The important thing is to have a realistic image of your likely
professional audience, one that encourages you to ‘see what
may be thought against your thought’ in Nietzsche’s terms
(from the epigraph to this chapter) without paralysing you
from composing, developing and upgrading your text.
ConclusionsTo learn from experience is to make backward and
forward connections between what we do to
things and what we enjoy or suffer from things inDEVELOPING YOUR TEXT◆ 155