"Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read it and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them...now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that;...and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world." - Virginia Woolf, Orlando.

I've been in the process of writing my thesis for several months now. I've got one chapter down with nine more to go. I can say that it's been a real challenge to my emotional equilibrium. I've developed the sneaking suspicion that, in fact, I cannot write. That I'm stuck with an absence of talent in that department. That this will serve as my greatest handicap in my career going forward. I also worry that my writing will never be able to do justice to my research experience and that consequently the most interesting year of my life will be transformed into a textual work so boring that nobody will be able to read it without suddenly falling into a coma.

I've been comparing the writing of my first chapter to walking a poorly trained dog (a really big one like a Great Dane) through an obstacle course. I had a number of points I wanted to make in that chapter, but could never seem to properly write and develop them because I was too busy doing damage control, trying to wipe out my really god-awful wordings and my more vapid and vacant prose. This is probably not the right way to write, but I couldn't help myself.

As for my 'emotional equilibrium,' I thought I was on a pretty even keel until two days before I needed to submit the chapter. I woke up that Sunday morning and couldn't write a single sentence without immediately holding down the delete key until whatever inane thought I had expressed was gone from my sight. It went on like this the entire day as I sunk further and further into a state of frantic anxiety. I could hardly sleep at all that night.

I pulled it together the next day and finished something that I submitted to my advisor via e-mail with the exasperated statement, 'I can't look at this anymore.'

Sometimes, to give myself some comfort, I try to think of all the people I admire who are unproductive writers. Or I re-read some of the 'writing about writing' that I've found in various books, such as the Virgina Woolf quote above. I try to remind myself that anxiety and self-doubt is the name of the game, even among the most brilliant writers. Writing is mental torture for nearly everyone. As one of my favorite research manuals notes, "writing is like high-level athletics and risky work in that it requires regimens of self-discipline and courage." (Lofland and Lofland, Analyzing Social Settings). All of this serves as confirmation that anxiety about writing does not imply a lack of writing ability.

When it comes to writing my thesis, that particular process is all the more perilous because writing seems to be the only enduring and practical way that I can transform my research experience from a messy pile of notes and transcripts into something that exists outside of myself, in a format that other people can consume. If I don't write, that experience stays with me alone. As time goes on and my memory fades it seems almost as if the whole thing never happened. I can't see this as anything other than wasteful. I also know that whether or not my writing is consumed depends largely upon my ability to write engagingly and readably and of course, the demands of academic writing make it even more difficult to write that way.

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