I'm A Pro At Crastination

In Right #4 of Vicki Spandel’s book The 9 Rights of Every Writer, she talks about the right to personalize one’s own writing process. “No two writers go about the business of discovering, shaping, or sharing ideas in just the same way,” she writes, and I couldn’t agree more. Over many years of writing, both for school and for myself, I’ve developed a process for writing that probably wouldn’t work for anyone else. If I had to break it down, I’d say it’s a three-part process: procrastinate, agonize, and then crank on it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Like so many writers, I do my best writing at the last minute. That’s because I do all my writing at the last minute. Fortunately, after years of feeling bad about it, I was validated by a college professor who told our composition class that procrastination isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He illuminated the differences between active procrastination and passive procrastination. The former means that even when you’re not doing the actual writing, you’re thinking about the subject, getting ideas, making plans, either consciously or subconsciously – even while you’re playing Guitar Hero. The latter means you’re playing Guitar Hero because, against all evidence to the contrary, you think that if you put if off long enough, that paper really will write itself.

I do both, frankly, and it depends on 1. the assignment itself, and 2. the demands of daily life. After doing laundry, vacuuming, organizing my workspace, and finally facing the facts, I sit down to write. Those first few moments are the agonizing part. If I’ve got a great idea, I want it come out perfectly the first time. If I don’t, then at least I want to write something I won’t be ashamed to put my name on. I sit at my desk and I think. And think. And then I put my name and the date on it. And then I think some more. Three ice ages later, the first word gets typed, and some short time thereafter something just happens – and I’m off. Ah, the magic of writing. The brutal, painful, miserable magic of writing.

So I definitely understand the need to respect each student’s process for writing. I hated drafting in high school and college, because I never really understood the purpose. I remember every teacher I ever had (except that one professor) saying, “Now, don’t wait until the last minute,” never acknowledging that waiting until the last minute works for some people. My version of that would be, “If you’re the kind of person who can wait until the last minute and still do quality work, then by all means. But if you’re not, you should accept that, and try to figure out what kind of writing process will work best for you.” And then I’ll do my best to help them do just that.

This week’s resource link: The Writing Process. This page is a tutorial developed by Jill Haslam that acknowledges the “recursive, rather than linear” nature of writing, and goes through the steps and strategies of each part of the process - I especially found the various prewriting strategies to be useful.