It’s finals season, and I’m certain that many of us are absolutely drowning under assignments and exams right now. I feel you.
It’s times like this when I question why I decided it was a good idea to specialize in literature.
My life has been entirely overrun by essays and research and writing, including the crown jewel of my semester – a 2500-word essay on modernist literature. I have been unable to think about anything else for days. As I am writing this, it’s due in two days, and I’m stressed. No, it’s not finished. Yes, I’ve known about this essay since mid-October. But you know what? It’s not my fault that I had fifty other assignments due the same week that shoved this essay to the bottom of the Pile of Priorities.
But alas, those assignments are done, and I stare down the barrel of what will so far be the longest paper I’ve written for my undergrad. Sigh.
Every thought I have right now is more-or-less targeted toward this essay, and so I thought instead of forcing myself to write about something that I’m not particularly focused on right now, I would embrace the fixation I have toward this essay and tell you my step-by-step process for writing essays.
Disclaimer: This process is what works for me and in no way reflects what my professors say I should be doing. In fact, I probably would never recommend this method to anybody, because it definitely stresses me out. But you know what? I’ve been getting A’s with this method for nearly four years now, so it makes no sense to switch it up when I only have one semester left.
1. Procrastinate
Not once have I ever been given an assignment and got to work on it immediately. It will sit in my to-do list for weeks until enough time has passed that I can feel sufficiently stressed enough to summon the motivation to begin. Unless my brain feels the urgency of the situation, the motivation to actually do the assignment will not come.
My best methods for procrastinating include making useless Excel sheets for random charts (that I will never touch again), going on a cleaning frenzy, and going down Wikipedia rabbit holes – all things that make me feel like I’m being productive without actually being productive. I am being productively unproductive.
Once I’ve reached the point where I can no longer procrastinate without it actually affecting my work, I can finally begin.
2. The Very, Very, Very Rough Thesis
I’m a planner. I need to have a very detailed, organized structure that guides me while writing the actual essay or else I will ramble on about every thought I have ever had on a subject. This includes before I begin the research phase – I need to have some idea on what I will write about so I don’t just compile a list of fifty different sources that have nothing to do with one another. So, I write down a couple of sentences on what I want to talk about – my rough-rough thesis. This version of the thesis will definitely not make it into the final essay and will likely never see the light of day, but it’s a decent starting point.
3. Research… Yay
I hate research. I find it to be incredibly time-consuming, particularly when I don’t always care what other people have to say on a particular subject. When it comes to literary essays, I tend to focus more on my own close reading of the primary texts and what the author themself is saying about their work through their artistic choices – so citing articles from other people who are also doing this to “back up” my point feels sometimes pointless. If I need background research on the particular historical or cultural context that I can’t get in the text itself? That’s fine. Otherwise, it just feels like it’s eating up my word count when I already have a lot I want to say on a particular subject.
4. Outline like Your Life Depends On IT
This is my favourite part. Once I’ve done all of the research I need to do, I begin to organize it into an extremely detailed outline, complete with the quotes I want to use from my primary texts, my analysis of these quotes, and the secondary citations I found in my research. I will also write rough introductory and conclusive statements for each point. This is also the stage where my thesis might look similar to the thesis I use in the final draft.
For the essay I’m currently working on, the outline is nearly as long as the final essay should be. While the final draft will (hopefully) reach 2500 words, the draft is just over 2000 words long. When I say my outlines are incredibly detailed, I mean I could just turn the bullet points into full sentences and it would very closely resemble my final essay.
5. Write the Actual Thing
A.K.A., the stage where I’m convinced that every thought I’ve ever had is irrelevant and imposter-syndrome kicks in full-force. This is where I’m currently at with my essay-in-progress, where it feels like everything is falling apart around me and that I’m going to submit some half-baked slop that makes absolutely no sense. From experience, typically the worse I feel about an essay, the better it actually ends up being. Some of the best essays I’ve ever written were ones where I descended down a mental spiral while writing. Whenever this happens, I find it somewhat helps to step away from it for an hour or so, reboot myself, then return with a fresh perspective.
6. Edit, Rewrite, Repeat.
I love editing… everything but my own work. I’ll wait about a day after I finish writing to start edits so I can separate myself from the paper. I take apart everything that I just spent days writing and scatter it into pieces around me to hopefully rebuild it to be better than it was. My method of writing is typically a stream-of-consciousness one, which is why I use five million commas and em dashes in every other sentence. Unfortunately, what makes sense to my brain does not make any sense to others, so I have to basically rewrite every single sentence to reword them.
This is also the stage where I have to cut things out. Because of my stream-of-consciousness method, I tend to over-explain, over-analyze, and include my fun little bonus thoughts. If the outline of my current essay is nearly as long as the final draft should be, then the version I will end up with will likely be hundreds of words over the recommended word count. So, I have to part with some arguments that I oh-so-lovingly placed, because in the long run they’re not actually very relevant to my argument.
Once I put the essay back together, I do three rounds of grammatical edits. I read the essay out loud three times to catch misspelled words and awkward grammar. I can usually cut out a few more words here too, since reading out loud also helps me check sentence flow.
Then, ta-da! I have written an essay! Rinse and repeat for any other assignments I have.
Time to stop procrastinating and go back to working on that essay.