Hi all, I am in my first year, only three months in... I feel a bit scared a lot of the time and very overwhelmed. People have said this is normal?
I have been reading reading reading for my literature review and want to actually write it now, however I go to write and it's just blank! I have a plan, which perhaps could be more detailed.... how do you get writing?!! PLEASE offer me some help, I can't sit for any more days feeling that i'm not accomplishing anything!

I've recently re-written my literature review and it took me some time to get into writing it. I found two books particularly helpful in getting me started: How to write a thesis by Rowena Murray and How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J. Silva.

Best advice I can give is don't get overwhelmed by the big picture (in this case the lit review), break it down into manageable chunks e.g. by theme/chronologically or however you intend to separate you sections.

Try brainstorming on a piece of paper or on the computer. Break your plan down into sub-sections as much as possible. Try recording your ideas to a voice recorder or to your computer if it has a microphone built in (Audacity is a good free program for recording if you don't have one). Which bit of the literature review would be easiest to start with? You don't need to start with the beginning, so pick any part that's easiest. And you can write near gibberish as your first draft, so don't worry about it being perfect. Just try to get *something* down.

You're going to face this problem (blank sheet of paper / wordprocesser to be reluctantly filled) over and over again during the PhD, but how you tackle it is the important thing.

Good luck!

Thanks! that's really helpful. I think breaking things down into very small things is very helpful! will get going and have a look at those books!

I agree with the others - when I go blank I just tell myself I'm just writing to get down everything that's in my mind, and I'm not going to show this to anyone else at all. That helps me give myself permission to write down what feels like utter rubbish at first - try just writing down the most obvious things about the literature you've been reading. Even just "X wrote paper X in 2010" - the absolute basics. Once you've started you'll probably find you pick up momentum quite quickly, and can then go back and edit to take out the parts that aren't so great.

If you're really stuck, though, take a day off and don't think about it at all, or do some completely different work - may be all you need to come back fresh the next day.

Good luck!