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Just had a thought. Have you ever had the feeling where you enjoy reading over your own writing?... Have you ever reread something you wrote, maybe even over and over again, and marveled at the beauty of the words?... I have. I have written things at times which make me very happy, and which I want to reread. I have written things and then spent hours painstakingly correcting one page, not bothered by the colossal amount of time that was slipping by. I have had that feeling where you've written something and you read it and feel pride at rereading your own work. I have written the odd thing on this blog which has made me happy. 

Not so much with the PhD, mind. It works for the creative writing, but not for this. Like now, for example: I have just opened a file which contains a draft of my Chapter 1. I started to read it. And I wanted to close it down immediately. The chapter title, the sub-headings, none of it is inspiring; all of it sounds crap. There must be a way, though. I wish I could transfer that feeling, that 'Oh my God this is so good, I could just spend all day making this perfect' - feeling, on to the PhD. There must be a way.

Trouble is, something tells me that this is the way to go about it if you want to write a PhD thesis you can be proud of: to write something that makes you fall in love with it a little, and makes you want to reread it. I'm not quite there yet.