Reading and writing

I love researching - a process of endless mystery and discovery. I am presently involved in researching a thesis but am being encouraged now to leave off the archival research and secondary source material and write up the results gained from all that reading.

This is an idea not entirely without merit; I often feel pregnant with ideas about original lines of argument and novel ways to express my thoughts on other people's criticism of my topic - until I attempt to write.

Then my innner pedant takes over; turgid prose seems to be all I can produce. The only way to relieve the monotony is to take interest, as I write and re-read my notes, or check biographical details ...or look up a reference... yes, you see where this is going... is to hop back onto the research carousel and just see where it will take me.

It will almost always be to a rewarding place, leading me off on a wide tangent until fairly frequently bringing me back to a nexus point with some other loopy thread of the narrative.
This is the problem: I am not writing a book, certainly not a Great Narrative (how we are discouraged from those C19th over-arching themes now) but a thesis in which my supervisor advises 'shorter is better'.

Trim, slice, pare, reduce. Describe less, analyse more.