What’s vexing me in my PhD at the moment is that the department wants to see a complete introduction and substantive chapter at this checkpoint, and that’s…just not the way I write? How I write is much more like the inkspot theory of counterinsurgency: I start with little sentence- or at most paragraph-length chunks of ideation, and suture them together until they form arguments, then hopefully a fabric. The coherence remains low for most of the way, before going asymptotic toward the very end.
