Writing in the dark

At the end of each semester, weary graduate students in universities all over the country stumble to administrative offices clutching stacks of expensive-looking paper. The work of three or four or five or more years comes down to a weary looking official thumbing through the pages to make sure all the margins are properly aligned. Then, at least in my experience, if you pass the cursory inspection, said weary official disappears with your bound dissertation and returns with an embossed certificate and, in a very weird token gesture, candy. Congratulations! you just graduated and you're now a Ph.D.

Last May I found this whole last ritual--the delivery of the dissertation and the acceptance of the candy--abrupt but inexplicably comforting. Having finished the dissertation turned out not to be as grand a finale for me as I had once imagined; I was lucky enough to find a job right out of graduate school, and so the dissertation came to signify not the apotheosis of my graduate career, but the very rough draft for an even longer and more exhausting project. I was so done with graduate school that I didn't even bother to participate in the "real" graduation-- the ceremony in the Graduate Office was enough for me, and I moved out of my apartment the day of the hooding ceremony.

In what seems like the twilight of the academic publishing era I think I book is a fairly ridiculous requirement for tenure. But I'm grateful to be in a university that only has one book, not two, as the standard for tenure. I didn't touch my dissertation at all last semester, but after attending several meetings with various deans who kept referring to the ticking of the tenure clock I pulled up all the files on my computer a couple of months ago and thought, "Now is the time to turn this thing into a book."

But I just sat there in front of the computer for about an hour, staring blankly at the screen. This was no longer a "dissertation," it was a "book project," and I felt lost in the interstices between the two. I didn't have a clue where to begin. I consulted my sublime former advisor, who encouraged me to "conceptualize the larger framework of the project," so I spent a week fixing all the little typos and awkward sentences in the first two chapters. I spoke to a charming older colleague who advised me to "think about what distinguishes a dissertation from a book and then apply that to the project." I gave the whole thing to him to read so I wouldn't have to.

After several weeks of fruitless agonizing, nitpicky editing, and watching snippets of the original "He-Man" on YouTube (clearly I, like Adam, want to transform from a cringing first-year professor into an Academic of the Universe), I have slowly resumed my research, trying to contextualize and deepen the thoughts already on the page. I still don't really feel like I have any idea how to proceed; I just got tired of sitting and started to grope about in the dark. Graduate school taught me taught me how to do research, but it didn't teach me how to be an academic, much less a professor, and while I sift through an ever-growing array of books, I'm waiting for the light to turn on.