How I Survived my Thesis

If anyone actually checks this blog regularly for updates, you've probably noticed that there haven't been any in about a billion years. (Well, more like two months. But it feels longer.) This is because I have spent that billion years (or I suppose two months) immersed in writing my senior honors thesis.

Because of the SURF grant that allowed me to start researching for this over the summer, I've been at work on this project since the end of June. But really, since I had to research and write a proposal for SURF that was due in March, I have been working on this since February. And really, if we're going to get technical, I've been wanting to write something like this ever since my first English course at Berkeley, where I read Pride and Prejudice in a truly scholarly manner for the first time and fell more deeply in love with English as a critical practice and Austen as an author.

So eight months, or fourteen months, or four years later -- however you want to put it -- I'm done.

It hasn't been easy. It has involved more books, caffeine, and tears than are likely healthy for any single individual to experience. But it's also cemented my belief that this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, and it's taught me a lot of important things along the way. Because I am mostly a tissue of things that other people have said and how I have thought about them, I think about the lessons I've learned in terms of the quotations that seem to encapsulate them the best

"If you're going through hell, keep going." --Winston Churchill

My father quoted this to me at the beginning of the summer, and I've been living it pretty much ever since. Life is not easy. But you can't go back, so looking back isn't going to be much help. This thesis, along with the other pressures of life over the last year (ranging from grad school applications to work to volunteering, not to mention those other English classes I was taking), has occasionally felt like hell. But I kept going. And I made it through.

"I hope when you have written a great deal more you will be equal to scratching out some of the past." --Jane Austen

I encountered this gem of advice over the summer when reading through Austen's collected letters. She wrote it to her niece, Anna, who was also an aspiring novelist and often sent excerpts to her aunt to critique. Even though Austen's comments make me doubt that Anna was anything better than an average writer, Austen is surprisingly kind with her honesty.

It's that combination of honesty and critique that made this quotation into one of my thesis mantras. Austen admits that "scratching out some of the past" is hard -- something you have to be "equal" to, and something that takes time. It's difficult to work so hard at something and then acknowledge that it isn't all working, that some of it is bound to be deleted. The only thing that will make you "equal" to doing it is writing more to take its place, and I love that Austen realizes this. It's an encouragement to joint revision of the old and production of the new, one that suggests exactly how intertwined those practices are.

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned." --Paul Valery

I was first given this advice in a fiction-writing workshop, but I've come to realize over the years that it applies almost equally to any form of written endeavor. The bottom line is that nothing will ever be perfect. There will always be some word that can be changed or improved, some new source to footnote, some new direction that your argument ought to address. But if you get so caught up in revision, so desperately tied to making it perfect, you'll never end up with anything. There's a point when you just have to suck it up and tell yourself you're done -- for now. Abandonment is not a forever thing, especially not for me in this context; there is a good chance that at least some of my thesis will survive and wind up as a chapter or two in the first book of literary criticism that I publish somewhere down the road. But until I have to start thinking about that, I'm going to leave the thesis behind for a while and gain some perspective.