I write this to capture a point in time for my own PhD experience. This is my own journey. Yours may be different. Take what adds value. Leave the rest. Be awesome.

Getting stuck on writing is like crawling through an ever-shrinking tunnel made of double-sided tape. You start off well but at some point your arms are at your sides and you feel like you can’t move. I recall a similar experience when cleaning the ballast tanks for a nuclear powered submarine in the US navy. In both cases, you can look around and ask “How did I end up in this place?”

My experience in the Navy taught me that you often don’t get out of your predicament with the same effort that got you into it. So as I aim to complete my PhD, I search for inspiration from unconventional sources, looking for keys to keep the words flowing. This is how I stumbled across Stephen King’s memoir On Writing.

Before I share my personal reflections, a brief recap for those just joining the show. I have been working on a PhD for the past three years (plus 3 months leave of absence plus six month extension). I say “working on” with a caveat that the word also means procrastination, life interruptions, and general doing other stuff. I have found that “doing a PhD” is not the same as “completing a PhD”.

Last October I spent 90 days on the road covering 12,000 km to interview 187 leaders in 15 regions to understand the relationship between innovation ecosystems and community resilience. Since then I have been applying outcomes in regions while coding interview data and writing up the results. This brings us to the current state of writing the thesis.

I have been struggling of late as one eye that watches the world go by and the other staring at a document with a word count that is not growing as fast as I would like. Like practicing the flute while my friends play kickball. I was commenting on my predicament recently to a good friend who gave a bit of a pep talk: “The people will still be there come January 2020 when you resume. Just get that PhD done so you can come out and play!”

I find there is no absence of inspiration. Inspiration wells up from the heart, motivates desire, fuels fires of intent. The world has enough intent. Nor is there a lack of ability. My vocabulary, grammar, and word processing prowess has created an academic and professional career littered with compelling assignments and reports.

No, the gap is between inspiration and ability. The chasm is the domain of the head. I have been accused of thinking too much, which is an odd critique for someone working on (I mean completing) a PhD.

What I expect they mean is that I think about what others think too much. This is accurate. An over-emphasis on other’s opinions creates a circular reference that, when introduced into writing, stalls the process. So I turned to one of the greats for advice.

Stephen King

I was a fan of Stephen King as a kid, along with Vincent Price and b-grade pre-70s schlock sci-fi and horror flicks on our black and white 13 inch TV. I was dubious about the current two-part theatrical adaptation of IT, having suffered through the made-for-TV series of IT and a general loss of appetite in contemporary horror movies of the Saw variety.

But I took a punt and gave the movies a crack. Glad I did. It was funny in the right spots and entertaining in a theme park manner. I make a comparison between Trent Renzor’s Nine Inch Nails and industrial music. Purist industrial of the Skinny Puppy variety can be the sound of drills and trash can lids compared to the commercial value of Renzor’s Pretty Hate Machine. In the same way, the modern version of the movie IT commercialised horror in a way that’s fun for the whole MA 15+ family.

I share this as backstory for me investing in nostalgia and the audiobook of IT. I drive a lot and almost always have an audiobook on the go, usually related to my chosen field of business or innovation. I figured I would pause and take a timeout to listen to IT.

If you have 44 hours to spare, it is an incredible experience. Steven Webber the narrator has an amazing ability to take you on the journey. He screams, cries, wimpers, whispers, stutters, and growls as each character, taking you on the journey. I caught myself popping my bluetooth headset in as I took short walks between city meetings just to get in a few more minutes of narrative.

I then stumbled across someone commenting on Stephen King’s brief memoir On Writing as writing inspiration. The completion of this audiobook and Kindle counterpart brings us to this blog post today.

Lessons from On Writing

We gain so many lessons from hearing from those who are masters of their craft. There are always common themes regardless if they are writers, athletes, business leaders, and politicians. Hard work, consistent habits, overcoming fear, being transparent and vulnerable, confident and courageous.

Listening to Stephen King himself share his memoir is like being in the audience of a 7-hour Ted talk. Only difference is that instead of an auditorium I was sitting in the driver’s seat of a 1970 Karmann Ghia doing 100 clicks down a freeway.

I recommend you read or listen to the book if you are so inclined. I capture below some excerpts that spoke to me. These will have more weight when I finish the PhD. For now they are just personal notes and reminders rather than recommendations for others.

1. Persistence

“Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard either emotionally or imaginatively is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it. And sometimes you are doing good work when it feels like all you are managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”

Be it writing, founding a startup, or running a marathon, the desire to give up is natural. The opportunity is to press through. One foot in front of the other, daily habits, individual steps.

2. It’s important, just not self-important

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

When you stare at something for so long, that thing tends to become the centre of the universe. It’s important, but so is most everything else in the universe someone is staring at. That’s the beauty of it all.

At a minimum, thinking about everything else helps reduce the size of the work and makes it more digestible.

3. Writing as telepathy

“All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation.”

Any creator brings people in the same room. Painting a canvas, building a business, writing a thesis – you are inviting people into your room. It halps to make it conversational.

Academic writing just as much. How can I take the reader on the journey with me rather than writing at them.

4. Be bold

“Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page. I’m not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I’m not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn’t a popularity contest, it’s not the moral Olympics, and it’s not church. But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.”

There is a long and continuous conversation thread about the insecurities and questioning that creep into the PhD journey. The writing can dry up when these leak onto the page.

Much like a startup, most PhDs I expect (and hope) begin with a problem. Hesitancy will not solve the problems. The PhD thesis needs to kick the problem’s ass.

5. Fear

“I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild – timidity is the word I’ve used here. If, however, one is working under deadline – a school paper, a newspaper article, the Standard Aptitude Test writing sample – that fear may be intense.”

“Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need to define some sorts of writing as ‘good’ and other sorts as ‘bad,’ is fearful behavior.”

Fear is one of the main sources of energy for most issues in life. It is at the evolutionary core of mindset, the innate fight or flight response. Fear drives the need for external validation, introduces second guessing into the writing.

Fear is not addressed by saying “Don’t be afraid”, but rather be courageous. One of the key tools is vulnerability and truth.

6. Truth

“What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all . . . as long as you tell the truth.”

“the unspoken contract that exists between writer and reader – your promise to express the truth of how people act and talk through the medium of a made-up story.”

“The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see.”

The way out of fear is truth. As they say, “Say what needs to be said and say it.”

My research contains many truths that are confronting to current conventions. There are many points I want to make. A majority of my time is spent building the case so it is not just one more person’s opinion. If I then adapt the truth to fit a narrative, I and the work will lose credibility.

It can be both tempting and mentally exhausting to adapt the message to what you believe the readers expect to see. You also lose yourself and your position in the process.

6. It takes work

“I’ll be as encouraging as possible, because it’s my nature and because I love this job. I want you to love it, too. But if you don’t want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well – settle back into competency and be grateful you have even that much to fall back on.”

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

“TV – while working out or anywhere else – really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs. If you feel you must have the news analyst blowhards on CNN while you exercise, or the stock market blowhards on MSNBC, or the sports blowhards on ESPN, it’s time for you to question how serious you really are about becoming a writer. You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, I’m afraid, that Geraldo, Keith Obermann, and Jay Leno must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”

“Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading, or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic. That goes for reading and writing as well as for playing a musical instrument, hitting a baseball, or running the four-forty. The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate – four to six hours a day, every day – will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them;”

Not much more needs to be said. Extraordinary outcomes only come from extraordinary effort.

7. Back to writing

“your time is valuable and so is mine, and we both understand that the hours we spend talking about writing is time we don’t spend actually doing it.”

Most of my writing these days, at least public-facing, is deep, researched analysis published on the company blog and LinkedIn. Existential posts such as this can feel self-indulgent particularly when I could have spent the time writing the thesis or other content to move the industry forward. There are several draft posts and journal articles waiting impatiently for my attention.

The internet is also full of inner monologue pieces, of which I have contributed to for well over a decade. There are also at least a dozen reflection pieces on King’s reflection piece, which should be expected from a memoir by a writer to writers.

Perhaps these thoughts are more inner chatter. It does feel good to pause for a couple of hours to reflect and perhaps has a combined value of sharpening the saw and creative outlet.

OK, enough of this, back to writing…