Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

I've been struggling with procrastinating my thesis, and every time I get back to writing it I remember why. Sometimes I just feel overwhelmed about how to make my academic drivel seem important. I get frustrated with not knowing what to do, and then I stop for a while and it becomes this ugly avoidance cycle. So, I guess I would like advice about these things:

1) How to keep writing my thesis; and how to write about the "so what" part of it
2) How to stop procrastinating/hating working on it.

Have you ever seen the movie "What About Bob?" Baby steps to the thesis. That's what I did. Break up what you have to do into tiny pieces, then either do them sequentially if they have to be done sequentially, or pull them out of a hat if they don't have to be done sequentially. Here are examples of what I might mean by tiny pieces:

-Write paragraph for intro chapter explaining why I couldn't study convection in my stars (as opposed to "write entire introduction chapter")
-Look up the reference for one of my "insert reference here" spots
-Make one figure from data that already exists

They don't necessarily have to be things that don't take much time to do, but they do need to be the sorts of things that are kind of "one problem at a time". Small units of complexity, if you will. If you see several problems that you will encounter in writing a particular section of text, for example, then break it up into one baby step for each problem. Doing this made all three theses that I have no written somewhat less painful. Good luck!

When I was working on my senior project for my undergrad (which was obviously not nearly as frightening a thing as a master's thesis), there were two related things that helped me immeasurably in getting through my rough draft. One, like NerdGirl said, was to take baby steps. The other was to let go of my perfectionism.

I had a rule that I had to write 400 words a day, six days a week, until I got to the end. Each day, no matter what, I would sit down with my outline and pick a sub-point that I felt like I was ready to write, and I was not allowed to leave my chair until I'd written 400 words. Occasionally I would get on a roll and churn out 600 or 800 words, but usually I'd quit at about 450. Then I would go eat a handful of marshmallows or something as a reward for accomplishing my goal.

(One of my roommates had a completely different strategy that worked well for her: One day a week was senior project day, and she would gather up all her materials and be in the library for 10 straight hours and come home with 10 or 15 pages written. I ... do not have the attention span for that, but it worked for her, anyway.)

I was also very clear with myself that they did not have to be 400 GOOD words: no pressure to get it right the first time. I just had to get the ideas onto the page; clarifying and making things pretty could come later. Occasionally if I was really stuck, I would give up on academic language altogether and write like I was explaining the point to a friend: "Okay, so, most female characters are supposed to be all angelic and stuff, right? But Mr. Rochester likes to think of Jane as a fairy instead of as an angel, and that's part of why she ... " When I got to the revising stage, of course, it was a headache trying to sort that out, but less of a headache than starting from scratch because at least the ideas were on the page.

Good luck with your thesis, Whistler! Keep us up to date on how it's going.

Thanks for the advice! I've been trying to work for five minutes, and then five minutes more. The tiny pieces worked for me for a while, but now that I'm revising for like the fourth time, I'm kind of flummoxed about what my next piece should be (reverse outline existing analysis, re-organize to make it less gross, then revise conclusions appropriately? I guess that's a start). Since it's a literary thesis I feel like there's less overt structure than in a scientific piece where you're obviously going to have intro, method, results, etc.

Thanks for your support; it does make a difference to me to hear from other people who have been there (besides myself).