Writer's Block

Well, I'm finally doing it. If you happen to have read some of my very early posts, you'll be aware that I'm just about finished an MBS degree and all I've got left to do is get my thesis written.

If you don't believe me, you can look in the archives. It's all there. If you couldn't be arsed reading back, you can just take my word for it and read on, MacDuff...

Anyhoo, I have finally stopped procrastinating and I am writing the blessed thesis. I'm up to 10,479 words (10,556 if you include footnotes and endnotes). I took this week off work to do it. I've been spending hours every day in front of my laptop, at my desk, with mountains of reference material around me.

The thing is, that I had about 7,500 words already written before I started working on it this week, which means that in real terms, I've only produced 3,000 words. That's an average of 1,000 words per diem. (I'm being generous and assuming that I'll manage to hack out at least another 1,000 words today - though that might be a little over-ambitious, seeing as it's already taken me the guts of four hours to string 500 words together so far today.)

I think that I've officially got writer's block and it's very discouraging. The submission deadline is the end of this month. I've got to have another 10 to 15,000 words (good ones too, not just some sort of crappy filler) written in the next fortnight. I'm meeting with my supervisor tomorrow afternoon and I had hoped to give him a 20,ooo word draft. Now I'll be lucky if I can squeeze 12,000 words out... I've even stopped kidding myself that I'll get a "good" 15 or 17,000...

But here's the killer. Last Friday evening, in the half-hour before I left work for the weekend, I whipped 808 words out of thin air to write my last blog. Not so much as a crinkled forehead to cause me trouble in producing it. I've just spent fifteen minutes here and produced 349 words and counting...

How come then, it's taken me four blasted hours to drag 500 stinking words out of my brain and onto the pages of my thesis? It's not like it's a completely uninteresting subject, and I've read enough papers and talked to enough people to have plenty of views on the topic. But can I marshall my thoughts and write them in a coherent argument? No.

Bugger.