By the end of Easter break I will need to have a completed first draft, that is 8000 legible and cohesive words. This is a daunting feat. I am the type of person who, the second they reach the minimum word count will immedietely submit their paper, so padding it out to 8000 is scary. This is made worse by the fact that I also will not start writing until I've done all the reading (quite a substantial amount I left at uni).
The answer to this is merging the two: writing my dissertation in a week (but not quite)
You see, 8000 becomes quite managable once you start thinking about things in terms of 8 x 1000. All I need to do is write 1000 words in 8 days. Except 1000 is still an intimidating goal, instead make it 600. This number was chosen because it is just over half, that way it tricks my brain into pushing the extra 400.
As well as this, I do not need to limit myself to a singular topic/chapter.
What was stopping me before was that I didn't have enough quotes or citations to handle the entire chapter at once, findind that starting the chapter was especially difficult. But, similar to skipping the first page of the sketchbook, I start somewhere random, simply commenting on another historian's argument and fitting it into my own, that creates a building block that can be fitted into a wider paragraph in the future.
This way I can see the argument start to form and how it flows. I'm covering a surprisingly large topic that has to balance a lot of factors (techincally multi-discipline as well) and so simply word-vomiting everything and neatening it later means that more can be said in an easier manner.
Hopefully by the end of this week, I will have something that I can frankenstein into a first draft... technically a pre-draft as I will then use these building blocks to form better structured and articulated paragraphs.
Overall, I aim to take as much pressure out of the process, as each day a substantial amount of progress will be made.
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