Exercise 2E- My Writing Process

When I need to sit down a write, comfy clothes are a must. I have to wear pj pants so I can shift around easily. I’ll cross my legs, fold them under my body, or prop them up on the shelf under my desk. It’s difficult for me to sit still for extended periods of time, so when I have to sit down to write, moving around in my seat helps dispel pent-up energy. When that fails, I sometimes get up and pace the room a few times. Part of my problem is that sitting at a desk is uncomfortable and unnatural for me. As much as I like writing, I hate having to sit down to do it. Consequently, I tend to put it off as long as I possibly can.

I confess, I’m an inveterate procrastinator. If an assignment has a research component, I’ll wait until a week before the due date to begin that part of the project. The earliest I ever start writing is three days before the due date, but most of the time I start and finish the night before (or morning of….). I don’t have multiple drafts. Sometimes, I barely glance over the finished paper before submitting it. There’s just something about the intense pressure of an imminent deadline that jump-starts my creativity.

Here’s an example of my “process.” One afternoon, I started writing my final paper for an AMS class. It was an eight page assignment, and I had only vaguely decided on a topic. It was due at midnight. Most of the afternoon was spent fooling around online, trying to decide on what to write about. Even after I made up my mind, I kept wasting time “researching,” when I was really just randomly surfing. The majority of the paper was written between 9 p.m. and midnight, because until then the pressure wasn’t enough to overcome my problems with concentrating. It was complete free-writing, without any kind of outline. I finished writing it with a few minutes to spare, which I used to check for typos. Maybe it would have been better if I had time to do any kind of revision, but I didn’t have that luxury.

It was only then that I started working on my ten page history paper that was due at noon. I had at least decided on a topic, but it was a much more research intensive paper and I had only read half the texts I was using as source material. By this point I had been up since the early morning and was running out of steam. Over the course of the evening, I tried just about every caffeine product imaginable: coffee, Red bull, Monster, Hydrive, Jolt, Vault, chocolate covered espresso beans…. You name it, I had some. Caffeine is crucial to my process. This time I sketched out a rough outline to get a sense of the order my ideas would progress in, but Mapquest provides more detailed steps. My hastily scrawled “outline” basically consisted of “Intro=>First point=> Support=>Second Point… etc.” Like the first paper, I finished this with minutes to spare. Any revision was done on the sentence level as I was writing. I tend to fixate on the details and have difficulty moving on until I feel satisfied with every word in a sentence. Unfortunately, no matter how beautifully crafted an individual sentence is, there needs to be some degree of global revision to make sure the ideas make sense together. All too often, this part of the writing process gets cut due to time constraints, much to the detriment of the overall quality of the paper. In this case, I ended up being awake for at least 36 hours straight, and near the end I kind of stopped caring. Still, I got 4.0s on both papers, and in both classes, so the papers can’t have been too bad.

These rather extreme examples aren’t completely representative of my process. If, by some chance, I start the paper a few days early, I follow the “antiquated” note card/outline system. I write detailed note cards as I read my sources and then sort them into piles based on subject. This gives me a visible indication of what areas I have a lot of information in, which helps when planning an outline. The outline itself is more like a first draft, since my bullet-points tend to be rather involved sentences. As helpful as this method is, it is also incredibly time-consuming, and I have a tendency to deviate from the outline. Once I start to wander off, the paper develops in a completely different direction, rendering half of the outline irrelevant. For that reason, I tend to favor the last-minute mad-dash, since it seems like the most efficient method. It gets the job done and doesn’t involve any wasted effort. Every last scrap of mental energy I possess gets poured into the paper, and the final product is not much different than if I spent a few more days on it. It’s physically and mentally exhausting, but it’s exhilarating in its own way.