All the mess the work makes.

A small tribute to the words no one will read...

Just how many words go into 100,000 words?

This is the question that has been on my mind as I consider the upcoming third and possibly final year of my PhD (oh dear lord). As the thumbnail for this post highlights, my approach to version control is somewhat lax. Do all of these words count?

Not all words survive, of course. Like a spawning frog, my approach is to have lots of children in the hope that enough survive rather than pouring all my efforts into just a few.

Not everything can make it into the final submission, dressed up, polished and footnoted. But these words stand on the bones of all those that came before. As I wrestle with word counts and killing darlings, I have been considering the words beneath those words. Scribbled margin notes, voice memos never transcribed, the three sentences typed at midnight on a phone, then never looked at again. The thought that felt essential at the time, and that now I cannot quite recall.

All creative work leaves this kind of residue. The painter’s studio floor thick with dried drips and spattered palettes. The marble/wood/cheese/ice that had to be removed to find the figure inside it. The dancer’s worn-through shoes. Every finished thing is surrounded by the wreckage of its own making. A thesis, it turns out, is no different.

Looking beyond my current ‘final’ document, my PhD exists in many places. There is a personal laptop and a work laptop, a desktop, there is my phone and an e-reader. And there are notebooks, many, many notebooks accumulated across different seasons of the project, some dutiful and dated, others a chaos of arrows and asterisks. I have no idea how many of these containers currently hold something I will one day need. I like to stress about this from time to time.

I am, by temperament, an editor. A fastidious redrafter. This means the 100,000 words I am working toward are not a target I am approaching linearly so much as a mass I am continuously reshaping. The thesis grows and contracts like a mould or the tide. I write in weird, unchronological orders and then need to weld, meld and retrofit bits back together. This leads to a lot of excess material. Ghost chapters. Orphaned arguments. Paragraphs that meant well but did not quite make the cut.

What I keep returning to is the mess of it all, the accumulated oil tanker in the Pacific spillage of three years of sustained thinking. Not just the words but the ink blotches, lost biros and scraps of paper that all went into the seven versions of an introduction. The highlighted passages in pirated PDFs that seemed important once. Hell, just all the words I spelt wrong, or every time I fat-fingered the caps lock.

I find myself feeling something close to melancholy for all of it. For the words that did their best and got left behind. For the notes that were never more than notes. All the mess that makes up the non-Euclidean maze of rabbit holes and intellectual cul-de-sacs that needed to be traversed and mapped just to get to this point.

The distance already covered, and the distance yet to go.

How many words go into 100,000 words? Honestly, I have stopped trying to count. The answer is: more than you would think, but hopefully not so many as to be impossible.