Anyone writing up their thesis?

[Steala]

I've had a difficult couple of years with issues at home that aren't going to go away. I've taken time away from my thesis due to MH issues but am struggling to get back into it. I am in my sixth year full time so hideously behind. I'm socially isolated now because everyone I know has submitted and left. I feel a bit hopeless about it really.

One of my problems is perfectionism and associated procrastination. I can break tasks down on paper but can't move past the feeling, when I sit down to write, that I am writing my thesis (and how overwhelming it is and how little time I have). I have tried setting achievable goals like 15 minutes or 50 words a day but I'm not fooling myself so I sit down to start and feel such panic that I can't bring myself to do anything. I've been stuck like this for over two years now.

Does anyone have tips or can share their experience?

Are you panicking at the idea of eating the whole elephant? Can you start with dividing the elephant into smaller chunks?

So to speak, obviously

I think that I've been in the same sort of hole so I really feel for you. It can feel really isolated when you don't have a cohort. I've always tended to view what I write as somehow final - I found a blog post that talked about how there's no writing, only rewriting. I tend to be a perfectionist and get stuck, and found it helpful to think about writing as a thought process rather than finished product. I ended up with a shitty, sprawling, over long first draft but editing that was so much easier than trying to treat generative writing as final product. I'm (finally) nearly there - you can do it.

Also - this might not apply to you - but I can get stuck on trying to craft the perfect opening paragraph. Sometimes just starting a paragraph or two in helped.

Have you thought about joining Phinished? It's an online group for people struggling to finish their theses with chat rooms so you can work with others and pledge boards.
I used it when I was in a very similar situation. I honestly wouldn't have finished without it.
You can do it, I know

I have an unfinished thesis. We are in almost exactly the same position except I have taken a withdrawal. I’m back at work while I figure it out. So stupid, because I know exactly where I am going - just paralysed.

It's really daunting, I'd suggest talking to your supervisor for advice

My supervisor was a total bitch, completely unhelpful and positively trying to stop me submitting because we didn't get on. My head of school kept tabs and I remember him saying 'just get it written and aster the viva you can make changes ... just get it in' ... I did and it was fine, but it's such a mammoth task

I actually just broke down into chapters and completed these in the end. I had a fixation in word count and I needed to put that to the side because it really didn't matter in the long run

Good luck! It's worth it in the end when it's over and you've got your life back

I got badly stuck with my final dissertation for my master's. An academic I knew advised me to start with the conclusion. So you write the conclusion you think you're going to come to and that helps free up your thought processes about what it is you want to examine and how you're going to do that. You dispose of this first conclusion and write a proper one when you're finished. It certainly helped unstick me. Breaking it down into chapters also helps.

Thank you for your support and suggestions. I can't believe I've never heard of Phinished. That looks right up my street so I have registered.

I do break the thesis into chunks but when I sit down to write a paragraph about x, I can't stop the feeling that I'm writing my thesis. Perfectionism can be totally paralysing.

My supervisor is wonderful but treating me like an unexploded bomb. He's being great at not piling on the pressure but on the other hand, has just let me drift for two years. Left to my own devices, I'm doing nothing at all. I probably need a bit of tough love at this stage.

Thank you all.

I got to the point writing up where it felt like every word had to be right and significant because THIS WAS MY THESIS, and it was paralysing. I really had to try to remind myself constantly that I wasn't committing to anything that I wrote in the draft. I found an article called 'It's a PhD, not a Nobel prize' helpful, if only to repeat as a mantra every time I got too hung up on some detail. I have it written on a post-it above my desk...

Also, are you writing in Word? If so, it might be worth taking a look at Scrivener if you aren't so far along that the thought of new software is horrifying. I really struggled to write in Word - it's so linear that it feels like all you can do is start at a point and move in one direction and you're just stuck if that's not working. Scrivener has a much more flexible structure - you can set up as many sub-documents which I found made it easier to just think about having to write that section rather than the overwhelming scale of a whole chapter. I quite often found that I'd have an idea when I was trying to write about something else, and Scrivener makes it easy to click across and jot it down so that it's not lost. Sometimes when I came to write a section I'd actually have a fair bit of content in there - sometimes useless, but often enough to get started with. It's inexpensive and not a huge learning curve. I got the recommendation from the Thesis Whisperer blog - another resource that I thought was useful.

Good luck with it all. Phinished is a brilliant suggestion, and I'm always happy to PM if you want a chat. Having a couple of people around who'd been through it was invaluable earlier this year when I hit a really low point.

Seconding the recommendation for "It's a PhD, not a Nobel prize".

I gave my supervisors a schedule of when I would give them the final set of drafts and stuck to it. They definitely weren't keeping me to it, and often didn't acknowledge what I sent them, let alone give feedback, but I sort of pretended that I'd be in trouble if I didn't stick to the schedule. I'm not a perfectionist, but I still found it quite hard to send off my stuff - it felt like I was sending a baby to be savaged, but you just have to be stern with yourself and don't think too hard about it.