The paper I am writing for the conference I am going to in Oxford is due in next week, and I only really got started on the research this week. Writing an 8 page paper and a 20 minute presentation doesn’t take much, but you have to generate about 20 times as much material to be able to whittle it down and find something worthwhile to say. If I took a leaf from my ex-boss’s book, I could just recycle one I’d prepared earlier, but I have too much integrity for that (which is probably why he’s a prof and I’m not – OK, I’ll put the claws away now!)
I always have this feeling that what I have to say isn’t particularly clever or interesting or original, because if it was worth saying, surely someone else would have said it by now? Being out on my own, and not part of the research community, not having people to bounce my ideas off, I find it hard to gauge whether there is any value in what I’m doing. Sometimes I think, am I any different from the idiots who rant away on blogs? (present company excepted !). Well, yes, I know I am, I have read very widely and thought very deeply, I have had stuff published in some reputable journals and I have the respect of some seriously intelligent and thoughtful people, who probably wish I would stop wasting my time and get on with it. But there is always that fear of the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ moment, the thought that I will be standing up there trying to explain myself and I will get back that big ‘so what?’ Granted, it hasn’t happened very often, and even when it has, it hasn’t killed me. But it’s the feeling that I’m a fraud and a charlatan, and one of these days somebody will notice. It’s hard to shake off.
I have to learn to take what I do more seriously. If I only scribble away at it for a few weeks a year when I want to write a paper as an excuse to go to a conference, it is hard to keep up the momentum, and the faith. But it is equally hard to keep up the motivation when there are so many other things competing for my time, as there have been these last few months. And the only way I can ever get any one thing done is by ignoring all the others.