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The End-game: Finishing

Your Doctorate

The tension between making it better and getting

it done appears wherever people have work to

finish or a product to get out: a computer, a

dinner, a term paper, an automobile, a book. We

want to get it done and out to the people who will

use it, eat it, read it. But no object ever fully

embodies its makers’ conception of what it could

have been.

Howard Becker^1

The art of writing does, in fact, give to those who

have long practised it habits of mind unfavourable

to the conduct of affairs. It makes them subject to

the logic of ideas ... It gives a taste for what is

delicate, fine, ingenious and original, whereas the

veriest commonplaces rule the world.

Alexis de Tocqueville^2

D

own the ages dispassionate observers have long com-

plained that intellectuals are diffident, unbusiness-like

types. They are happy to start projects but reluctant to finish

them. Interested in books and ideas and potentialities, they are

perfectionists who cannot close a deal, cannot say ‘this is good

enough’, cannot easily make a sale or cut a compromise. It is a

familiar and discomforting stereotype, which unfortunately has

a large measure of truth (certainly in my case). If writing is psy-

chologically difficult as a form of commitment, how much

more troubling is the letting go involved in ceasing to work on

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