Hi all,

At the start of the year I wrote a very tentative chapter, and then I moved on to what I thought would be a good idea for another. The problem is that I've been working on it for what seems like an eternity and the ideas will just not take shape. I feel like I have about a billion things to say, but no 'argument' and so no way to begin actually writing the thing, even in a fuzzy kind of way.
I know this is probably to be expected, but its frustrating as hell and I just wanted to see if anyone can offer a sympathetic word/ advice. My PhD is in English literature and thus tends to be very theoretical, so I'm used to working with abstract ideas and things which are difficult to pin down. But I've never known anything to be this hard to get my head around!

Thanks in advance :-)

Some chapters just take longer than others. I spent half (at least 7 months) of my first year on what was then one chapter. It was very theoretical and complex but I knew it was the hardest chapter so wanted to get my ideas down. Two years later that one chapter is now three chapters and all the time I spent was worth it.
Just don't try to make what you are doing now perfect. Expect that it is meant to be a bit confused and bitty at this stage; but if there are lots of ideas in there that aren't taking proper shape, it may be like me that you need to split them into separate chapters and make them a bigger part of your overall work...

Just a thought anyway!

thank you keep_calm for the question, and sleepy head for the answer. Its a very good answer, thanks a lot.

Thanks for that Sleepyhead.

It's reassuring to hear your experiences. I went into this having ridiculous expectations about how long a chapter would take- I think I expected to be able to knock something out in a couple of weeks :$ I've since learned that's not the case, and now I'm realising that all chapters might not take the same ammount of time either.
I'm not sure whether I could split it up yet, basically its about Robin Hood literature and I don't want to have a number of chapters looking at different texts. The ideas behind it though might well form the basis of other chapters.
Going O/T a bit now, but I think whats also frightened me about this chapter is that I've ended up meandering into a subject which I know very little about, i.e. medieval law, and I'm desperately trying to construct an argument when really I probably don't know enough about the subject to do that yet. I really wanted to get some written work out this year though, even if it wasn't perfect.
Not sure what to do; sorry if this isnt making much sense!