Writing Difficulties

Writing is hard. This morning, I talked on the phone with my aunt in Israel, who is a very good chronicler of family histories. She asked how I was getting along, and I told her that I had finished reading, but I was still writing my dissertation. I said it was really hard. She reflected that up until now, everything has been easy for me. I finished my undergrad studies, my first doctorate, without every experiencing any difficulty, and now I was finding something that was difficult, that had already taken a long time and was going to take even more time.

I'm not sure why this is. Maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew, the topic keeps expanding. I prune stuff and then it expands again. My first dissertation was about visual perception and eye-movements. I just clapped together the two papers I had already written (one in press, the other already published) and a talk I had given at a conference. The hardest part was making the changes requested by the external examiner. Now I think that would be easy, I have certainly learned in the intervening ten years to be less defensive. But the writing itself is hard.

Here I am, sitting in a cafe, writing this instead of continuing with the 20-odd pages I have down. Perhaps it is hard because last time all I had to do was describe the mechanics of things, and now the problem I am facing is more complex and my own view on it shaped by the integration of many different perspectives. It would take a book to write down exactly what I think about pain and how it can be treated. But I have a clear action plan, just to summarize the 9-10 books that have shaped my opinions, and worry about integrating them later.

A friend and fellow-student from the days of my previous degree just sent me a draft of her first novel. When we were both studying science, we each said we would write a novel by the time we were 30. Well, that deadline has been and gone, but if she can finish a book then so can I.