Hit a structural flaw in your Dissertation or Thesis?

I'm on a roll with Annie Dillard. I find her writing advice so salient, so moving and so gosh-darn true.

See below her comments on the structural challenges writers face...and yes, YOU are writer. Dissertation and thesis writing IS writing.


"Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

The problem is structural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book.

Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem, too - the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he never noticed.

He writes in spite of that.

He finds was to minimize the difficulty; he strengthens other virtues; he cantilevers the whole narrative out into thin air and it holds."