Today I want to share an excerpt of my non-fiction book that will be published later this year. It’s about a very interesting, and hard, time in my life, that helped me realize that what I really wanted to do was writing books. Here, I write about how challenging it was to start the research for my dissertation back when I was in graduate school. Enjoy!
“Oh my god! When you start the research for your dissertation you can read forever! This is one of the big traps of the research. Once you have defined your topic, you browse for all the relevant works that you think you need to read. So you put together the list and start the search and note taking that will allow you to support your ideas and dig deeper into the issues you are bringing up for discussion. The question is, how long do I keep doing this? After some months, you start feeling that it should be enough but the pull to keep searching and reading is strong. You have to stop reading at some point and trust yourself. Trust that what you’ve read until that point is enough, and start writing.
It took me such a long time to start writing because of my personal situation, but also because reading captivated me: I was loving it; I couldn’t get enough of it. One of my worst nightmares, or delights, was that every time I was reading a book it would have a bibliography —a list of other books and articles and references— and that would be the best excuse to go look for some of those books or articles. Other times, a book would be referenced in a footnote and that would trigger the need to search for it to understand completely what the author was referencing, etc. It was such a trap, especially with the internet, and Amazon, and Google books, where you can find almost everything! It was seriously insane. At one point, every time I was seeing my advisor she would tell me:
“Please write! Please give me something to read, write whatever you can! I want to see something in writing, please!”
I was just reading and reading and reading, it was insane. The other consequence of reading so much is that you want to put it all in your thesis. You find connections in everything that you read. So you need to control yourself, don’t run in every direction the reference books take you. Eventually, I realized that the way to avoid this is to focus on your topic. This will help you weed out any books that are too far from what you are actually researching, even if it’s really, really interesting. And the best way to stay close to your topic is to start writing. When you feel you can’t keep focus, writing about what you already know will help you see where the gaps are and then you can go and look for the information that is missing.
Sure enough when I started writing my first chapter —or what I thought was going to be my first chapter at the time— it gave me focus and forced me to keep my feet on the ground.”