After I defended my dissertation and received my PhD, I made a promise to myself: I was going to take a break from history. A break that should last at least a year. Besides, letting a project sit for a while before going back to it is a good practice with any kind of writing, because you can look at it with fresh eyes.
Well, as I write this, it’s been a little over a year. And I’m starting to look into the process of turning my history dissertation into a book. Something that, at one point, I wasn’t sure I’d ever do.
While I do not have big dreams of being a top internationally-renowned scholar (though, okay, that would be pretty cool), I do have the overall goal of being the best writer that I can be. Writing is my happy place. And, yes, I like research, too.
So…after a stressful graduate school experience during which both my love of reading and love of writing were severely tested, and considering that fiction is my preferred writing focus, how the heck did I get to this point?
It was like this.
Time Management Post-Dissertation: Knowing My Limits
After I defended my dissertation, there was that “now what?” moment of knowing that I suddenly had more free time. And after that first weekend post-defense when I took a breath (and slept a lot), I tried to fill that space pretty quickly.
(I should also mention here that four months after defending my dissertation, COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, and so much of this self-discovery happened during the bizarre world that was 2020.)
How did I use my free time after the dissertation? In addition to running, walking, and doing a lot more “fun” reading, I filled my time with more writing. I threw myself into revisions for an old novel and started brainstorming some new ideas.
At the time, I wondered whether doing so much writing was a mistake, because I was just giving myself something else that would hang over my head (i.e., get this manuscript ready so that I can start querying it to literary agents).
But here’s the funny thing that I started to notice: It didn’t hang over my head at all. I no longer felt guilty when I watched Netflix or took a nap or spent time with friends or, really, did ANYTHING outside of my job and my writing.
Why?
It was quite simple: I was writing for fun. Not because I had a massive project looming and was desperate to finally finish grad school. I was writing because I wanted to, not because I had to.
And therein lies the difference.
Returning to the Dissertation: How Writing For Fun Made Me Interested in My Research Again
In the summer of 2020, while working primarily from home and having a lot of extra time on my hands, I began another novel that I knew I’d see through to the end. It was historical fiction, and–get this–set during a time and place relevant to my dissertation.
What made this twist of events even more comical was the research I had to do (and continue to do) for this book.
In addition to looking at old maps, photos, and the good old internet, there were other sources I had to turn to. Like books I’d read in grad school, or ones that I knew about but hadn’t read in full.
And, oh, yeah…one of those sources was a paper I’d written in my first year of grad school.
Wait…what?
The point here is this: Writing for fun brought me back to why I liked studying history in the first place: the basic premise of finding (and telling) the stories.
And that’s when I realized the true gift I had given myself by finishing my PhD: I could do history now because I wanted to. Not because I had to.
But there was another obstacle to contend with first.
Fighting Off Doubts: When Impostor Syndrome Reared Its Ugly Head
For a while, I feared that what I’d researched wasn’t “scholarly” enough, or something like that. In the middle of grad school, a conference paper I’d written that later turned into one of my dissertation chapters got rejected by a German publisher for a collection of conference papers-turned-essays for exactly that reason. And the early draft of my dissertation needed a LOT of work before I was ready to defend, again for exactly that reason.
So until I got the point of actually defending my dissertation, my confidence about my skill as a historian was, obviously, in the garbage. Even after I was done, I wondered how in the world I would turn my dissertation into a book–or even if I would turn it into a book.
But then I got some nice words of encouragement. From my committee, from fellow and former PhD students, from family and friends. And I realized that a) my work was good enough to earn me a PhD, and b) that I’d finished one heck of an accomplishment. I had indeed earned the title of historian after all of that hard work.
It’s not ready to go out into the world as a book now; of course it’s not. No dissertation is, hot off the “thank-God-it’s-done” presses. But I had a revelation recently: I have the skills to get it where it needs to be.
And so, when I’m ready, I’ll brush the thin layer of dust off my dissertation, pour myself some strong coffee, put Demi Lovato’s song “Confident” on repeat, and get to work. Because I want to, and because this time, I’ll enjoy it.
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