One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received about work is to "try and make it fun." This was especially true about the dull, routine stuff that I had to do in office a few years back. This is definitely true about the exciting but very difficult and lonely stuff that is my main duty these days: writing. But for some reason I have not been able to make writing fun for me. Maybe it is because I take writing my chapters too seriously. Maybe I should learn how not to take them seriously.
This is not to say that I don't enjoy writing. But this joy comes more often after I have printed the whole thing out, the resplendent white pages with rows of black letters making a neat pile on the table. The joy comes from the sense of accomplishment, however temporary, ephemeral and deceptive. It is definitely there with the pleasant dizziness that I feel after saving the document, switching off the computer and opening up a bottle of beer. No quote can convey my feelings about writing as Hemingway's famous "writing is like bleeding."
Since I started my PhD more than a year ago, my supervisor has been telling me to "write as I read." I have understood perfectly well that that's the best way to do academic writing - when the writing evolves, goes hand in hand with reading, and does not come out in one outburst at the end of all the reading. But perhaps the biggest advantage of this method is that by the end of your reading (and before you have even started writing), you already have several pages of writing. That means job half done!
So I've been using Google Drive and Evernote and many pages of good auld paper writing while reading. And today I realised that this is the closest that I can ever come to "making it fun". Because when you're doing it in bits, you are not overwhelmed by the momentous task of typing up 10 thousand words in a week. You do it little by little and the bits add up in the end. I am sure many people have been writing like this for a long time, but for me this has become a revelation. There is light at the end of the tunnel!
