It’s official. My THESIS is kicking my ass.
I’ve been writing the THESIS in bits and bursts all semester, if not all year. As a result, I have multiple documents that are each somewhere between 2000 and 9500 words. I thought that at this stage, it would be fairly simple to stitch all these together. Hah! instead I found myself driven out of my favorite writing spot this afternoon, tearing my hair out due to the inconsistencies between the different pieces, since they were all written at varying stages of my comprehension of the topic at hand. Add to that the sheer scale of trying to wrap your head around Transmedia Storytelling at all and it makes a grown man choke.
This is all distinctly odd, actually, because prior to this I thought I had a good handle on things – and, all told, I think I actually do – but I’m going to take this weekend and first write up everything that I’ve been talking about in my recent presentations, then try to figure out where (and if) all the other artifacts from this year’s research fit in. After that I’ll go back through my clippings of quotes and other such things and work those in where appropriate to support my arguments. Once the dust clears from that, I’ll see where I stand. The THESIS only has to be between 60-120 pages, which should be a cakewalk; I have 20 pages in one document alone, 30 in another, and a whole pack of smaller ones snapping around their heels. The trick is getting them all to play nice with each other, and then chopping out the cruft, refining them into one single sleek, devastating intellectual requirement-killing machine.
So, yes. Death by THESIS. The trick is turning it from my death into the requirement’s…