My (Weird, but Surprisingly Successful) Writing Process

I've stared at this blank blog for about ten minutes, trying to decide if I should open with a witty one-liner or a clever metaphor, deleting enough sentences that together would have been a finished blog post by now. It's funny how the process of this blog post is almost exactly how every one of my papers in my high school and college career have gone so far. Struggle with an introduction for thirty minutes. Snack on some chips. Have a weird epiphany about what to write about. Then write the whole paper in one go.

It's hard to place myself in one of the four categories because I'm a little bit of all of them, but I would say that I identify most with the description of a Heavy Planner. I'm one of those people that will think of a big paper while I'm getting a perfectly toasted cheese bagel from Bagel Talk or when I'm cleaning my room that will be messy again the next day. I often like to get inspiration from things around me and I can usually write a paper in one sitting if I've done the planning in my head thoroughly enough.

As a result of the intensive planning I do, I fall into the trap of procrastination. If I don't fully think out my essay, I won't even start it. Instead I'll eat more chips and take more breaks to inspire myself. Thus, the black hole of procrastination sucks me in and I won't start writing until one or two days before its due. I try to justify my slight procrastination by saying that I'm trying to create the best essay I can in my head before writing it down on paper, but we all know that sometimes you just don't want to write.

This weird process that I've seemed to obtain over the years has seemed to be overall successful. I am able to finish the work and generally tend to be happy with the overall product, but again that's because for some reason my brain needs to think every piece out first before starting. I think that this process allows for me to achieve my best work because I am able to use all the ideas in my head to create a material that I am happy with. However, the problem with being a Heavy Planner is that I often focus too much time on planning and don't give myself enough time to actually execute the plan.

I would love to try the approach where you spend equal time on planning, drafting, and revising because I feel like it will give me a process that is more structured, which seems to be more beneficial in the long run. For now, however, my brain continues to look like the picture below when I am writing, a mess of ideas that needs to be organized before even starting to write.

Nikko. "Resentment". 2015 via SketchPort. Attribution 4.0 International