On my desk stands an elephant. It’s a simple one, made of wood. I picked it up in a market in India. It stands there as a reminder that everything will be OK as long as I make and stick to a plan.
Back in 2005/6, when I was writing up my PhD, I hit a real problem. It wasn’t the research. I’d done a lot of that. Too much, perhaps. No, it was the writing. And the timing. I had run out of funding, and I only had about a year left before I had to submit. But I was drowning. All I had was a pile of notes about as thick as my head. How was I going to turn that into 80,000 coherent words within that time-frame, when I didn’t even know where to start?
I burned up weeks in a state of near constant panic. Some days I couldn’t write at all. Others I’d write 2000 words that started well but then became so muddled that I had to throw them all away. Those more prolific days were followed by other days when–again–I couldn’t write at all. I couldn’t cope with the enormity of the task. 80,000 words. I loved the topic. I was fascinated about the material I had. I was full of ideas. But every time I tried to get a handle on the size and scope of it, it crushed me.
After several nights of night-sweats and insomnia, the problem got so bad that I went to see the doctor. He listened sympathetically and then prescribed me Valium. That didn’t help at all. The problem was just as big but now I felt too woolly to think clearly about it. That was no good. I didn’t want less clarity, I wanted more.
Had nothing changed at that point, I’m certain that I’d have abandoned the thesis.
But then I remembered that earlier in my PhD, at points when I’d returned from doing archival research and I’d needed to make sense of mountains of original source material, I’d been able to consistently produce small amounts of good quality writing. I was only, really, writing stories directly from the source material but, I’d reached the point where I could guarantee that on any given day, over a few writing sessions, with some good breaks, I could write 500 usable words, and do so without any real stress.1
I knew, given the right set up, I could sustainably write 500 words a day – day after day.
500 words, repeated over 160 days… would become 80,000 words.
160 days was, I calculated, about 9 months of weekday writing.
All I needed to do was write 500 words a day for 9 months, and I’d have the 80,000 words I needed.2
All at once, I knew that if I trusted myself to deliver to a target that I knew I could meet, and if I trusted the process to simply, slowly rack up words, I would finish the thesis.
The sense of relief was HUGE. Moreover, my realisation had a second impact. I knew that writing wasn’t all I had to do. I also needed to organise the material, and structure the whole thing, and fill in gaps with reading, and pull together the bibliography, and rewrite, and… and… But suddenly, having squared away the writing-of-the-thing, I was no longer terrified. I now had the mental space to think about how to fit in those extra things.
And so I started. Initially with a week’s tidying, planning and structuring.
Then I took on the substantive chapters. There were four, each about 10,000 words long. I took them one at a time. I gave each 2 weeks to plan, outline, and pull together materials, and 4 weeks to write. That took 24 weeks. I submitted them all for supervisor review.
Then I moved onto the literature and background chapters. I’d had a stab at these in my first year but needed to completely revise them. I gave each one about 8 weeks. After all, I had time, because by now I’d already written half the thesis! By the time I’d finished these, I was at about 70,000 words, and I was 40 weeks in.
By this point, I’d got my substantive chapters back, so I spent a week on each, adding in material from the library, and correcting errors. That took me to 44 weeks.
Somewhere along the way, I’d been tempted to do more than 500 words in a day. But I’d discovered that this was counter-productive. Not only did it mess up the plan, I found that if I suddenly started writing as much as I wanted, I could only do it for a few days before I started paying for it by not being able to write at all. Instead, I–again–realised that if I trusted the plan, and stopped when I got to 500, the afternoons were good times to do housekeeping: sort the bibliography, chase down references, organise materials for the next day, create illustrations, etc.
By the time my substantive chapters went off again, and I’d edited and corrected my lit review and background, I’d got about 6 weeks of my year left. Both the introduction and the conclusion were more creative, and less ‘nit-picky’ and academic, so these dropped out from thinking that was fresh in my mind, still at 500 words a day, but without any real planning beyond defining an argument.
With about a month to go–bar the tiny fettling jobs that you can’t really do until someone else has looked at your work–I was done. Printed, bound, and submitted. And all without more than an incidental amount of stress.
So, what of the elephant?
Well, I still have a tendency to panic at the size and complexity of writing projects. I also get frustrated that I only seem to be able to deliver them at apparently glacial speed.
My inclination is to want to do anything else, and particularly anything else that’s quicker!
And yet, I am deeply committed to writing, and to the result of writing – which is things written, and published, and available for others to read and use.
And I know that the only way to get things written, is to write them.
And so the elephant reminds me of that well known proverb that if you try and eat an elephant in one go, you’ll end up barfing it all back up again. But if you take it one digestible bite at a time, and trust the process, eventually (and you can actually predict when, by weighing the elephant and the bites!)3 you WILL finish the whole thing.
The elephant is, if you like, my reassurance of progress when I feel like any other evidence is lacking. It’s my process guardian. My impartial third-party, telling me that I’m doing all I need to do, and that keeping going just as I am is the only way to succeed.
My elephant keeps me sane.
- I’ve stuck with 500 words as a guide ever since. I’ve gradually learned to write more. Depending on how straightforward the writing is, I can now generate closer to 1000. But 500 is a low-stress, safe target that I know I can hit. ↩︎
- Adjust as necessary. An academic colleague of mine says that when he’s writing a book, he can guarantee 1500 words a day writing between 7 a.m. and noon. That’s a 100,000 word book in about 4 months. Stephen King says he writes 2000 words a day, but that it can take him anywhere from 3 easy hours in the morning, to all day. He works on the basis of 3 months to get a first-draft finished. ↩︎
- For fun, I worked out how long it would take to actually eat an elephant one bite at a time. If a bite is approx 25g, and the average elephant weighs at least 5000 kilos, that’s 200,000 bites. All i can say is that I’m glad I’m not really eating an elephant. ↩︎
The Garage of Books 
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