Suffer Less: On Writing as Process

Kate Eickmeyer

If you never struggle with procrastination, I applaud you. If you’ve been assigned this chapter and you now indignantly declare, “This doesn’t apply to me!” your angst-free life is its own reward, and perhaps the few minutes you spend reading this will give you useful insight into the epic interior battles your classmates and colleagues are silently fighting all around you.

Procrastination is a taboo topic because people associate it with moral failure. Whether you graduated from high school last semester or decades ago, you’ve probably encountered binary categorizations of people as either “lazy” or “hardworking.” Motivational posters command you to work hard and achieve your dreams, but they don’t tell you how to manage your time, energy, or competing obligations, and they can leave you with a painful, abstract sense of defectiveness. So, in the words of Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schultz, “You are more than the score on your last book report.” If you struggle with time and paper management or you tend to procrastinate, those habits don’t make you a bad person. But they may cause you a great deal of suffering, and you can suffer less. I’m not looking to coddle you, but to help you look at your own habits with more objective curiosity and less judgment, and to push back on the taboo that often veils the subject.

You won’t find any “tips n’ tricks” listicles here. Your electronic devices offer thousands of productivity systems, apps, websites, blogs, books, and podcasts jam-packed with strategies to overcome procrastination. Most productivity apps are aimed at corporate types rather than students, but a lot of them work just as well for school. Myriad non-digital methods also abound. Take a look, experiment, and talk to your friends and classmates about these.

Every semester I ask my writing students to talk about their struggles with procrastination. They share a variety of reasons for procrastinating, but there are distinct patterns: beliefs, affects, habits, and strategies.

Beliefs

“I work better under pressure.” Variations: “I need adrenaline to write,” and, “I can never think of anything to write about until the very last minute and I don’t know why.”

The ability to work under pressure is an asset, but the inability to work without adrenaline is a serious liability. Professional work usually requires a steady jog of productivity, not sporadic, adrenaline-fueled sprints. Yes, you can probably get through college this way, but you’ll be training your brain to depend on adrenaline, and then you’ll suffer when you start working in an office.

Just as you can train your brain to write papers under duress, you can train your brain to write a little at a time. As a first step, think about your writing habits. Are there variables other than adrenaline that change when you’re down to the wire? Do you create special, emergency working conditions for yourself, either internally or externally? Think about whether you can replicate these conditions before your back is against the wall. Sometimes, it’s not the adrenaline that gets you over the hump, but the permission you give yourself to focus on writing at the expense of everything else, and the comfortable conditions you create to get it done.

“I get better grades when I write papers the night before.” Variations: “I only make it worse when I revise,” and, “Isn’t your first instinct usually right?”

Maybe you’ve gotten some As on last-minute papers and Bs on papers that you worked really hard on well in advance of the deadline, and maybe this has convinced you that, for whatever reason, you’ll get better grades if you do your work last-minute. The problem is that your experience isn’t a large enough sample size to prove a correlation, let alone a direct causal relationship. A lot of random factors, including luck, can account for these experiences. Don’t develop a superstitious belief that last minute work=good grades, or that you have to put yourself through a miserable, sleep-deprived gauntlet to deserve a good grade, like some kind of ritual sacrifice to the gods of paper-writing.

Regardless of which possible, non-magical factors explain your anecdotal success with last-minute work, that success has an expiration date. As you move into college writing and upper-level coursework, effort and reward develop a much more direct relationship. The papers you have to write are just too long, too complex, and require too much research for some last-minute flash of brilliance to get you there.

Also, deference to your first instinct works on standardized tests, but it doesn’t work for writing long papers that require careful reasoning and explanation. Don’t import that advice from the world of standardized testing into your writing process.

“If I start a paper early, I’ll waste a lot of time working on it endlessly.”

This might be true if you’re inclined that way, but the solution is to cap the time you want to spend working on an assignment and stick to it. If you think you can write your paper in eight hours the day before the due date, allocate those eight hours to an earlier day, or days, and stick to your plan. Intentionally assigning times to tasks is a useful life skill to learn in college; the reward is more time to Netflix and chill in the long run.

Affects and Habits

Scholars these days tend to use the word “affect” rather than feeling, as “affect” carries the weight of a growing body of theoretical work in the humanities called affect theory, which in turn refers to a broader category of phenomena than emotions (which involve specific stimuli) or moods (which might, but don’t necessarily, involve specific stimuli) alone, although it includes both of these. Affect theory jettisons the reductive tendencies of psychoanalysis, which often looks to align individual experience with familiar narratives, in favor of a more exploratory approach, and it takes an active interest in the intersections of feelings, thoughts, and actions. Basically, though, “affect” is just a scholarly word for feelings, and it comes in handy when you want to write a paper about emotional experience.

Affects and habits inform one another, often to the point that the connections between the two are invisible. Thus, we’ll look at them in the same context, and try to sort through where affect influences and becomes habit.

The two affective states most commonly involved in procrastination are as follows:

Anxiety. Variations: perfectionism, self-doubt, feeling overwhelmed, uncertainty about what the assignment requires or how to fulfill it, overestimation of how hard the assignment is or what it will require of you

Aversion. Variations: dislike of task, topic, class, and/or professor

Anxiety and aversion are enormous topics this chapter makes no pretense to cover. The goal is just to give you some vocabulary for thinking through some of the emotional dimensions of the writing process in hopes it will help you gain insight into your experience. When it comes to writing college papers, anxiety and aversion can be two sides of the same coin.

There are many possible scenarios, but here are a couple of examples.

It might start like this: you receive a paper assignment at the end of class, when you’re tired and hungry and ready for the next thing, so you glance over it, find it looks vaguely exhausting and isn’t due for a month, and stuff it into your backpack. The assignment then hovers in the back of your mind for the first three weeks while you deal with 10,000 other assignments, chores, and obligations. With a week left to go, you fish the mangled assignment paper out of your backpack and read it, but you have no idea what to write about and don’t exactly understand what the instructor wants. At that point you might feel quite frustrated with yourself, the class, and the instructor, and the whole thing now feels like a big sadistic scheme to torment you and expose your imperfections. Then you get distracted or sleepy, and then back you go to all the other stuff you have to do. Every day that week you think about the assignment, planning to start it that night, but every night something comes up or you’re just too tired to have any good ideas. The night before it’s due, in a fit of desperation, you sit down and write something—anything—and it miraculously turns out okay, you get a decent grade, and then life goes on until the next assignment, when you repeat the cycle.

Or, maybe you receive a paper assignment and you have some big ideas for what to write about, and you decide you’re going to write an amazing paper this time that’s going to wow the professor, but you still stuff it in your backpack and other obligations overwhelm you for the next three weeks. By the time you pull it back out, you’ve forgotten your big ideas, and you’re now in the same boat as the previous scenario, except you’re even more frustrated and anxious because you started out with really good intentions, and basically go through the same process even more painfully, and it all feels even more personal. By the time you turn the paper in (late), you hate everything—yourself, the professor, the class, the topic, Baruch, and the whole space-time continuum.

Both of these scenarios add up to quagmires of anxiety and aversion so dense that you don’t want to think about the paper at all, which just results in more avoidance. The trap lies in directing your consciousness towards all these feelings instead of the task itself. The task gets so caked in emotional mud, you can’t distinguish the task itself from the bad feelings around it.

So, let’s think about where we can intervene before it gets this bad.

Skills and Strategies

The following are some gentle strategies to break the procrastination cycle that don’t require you to make seismic shifts in your personality. These suggestions might seem painfully obvious or facile, but they need to be said.

Spend five or ten minutes reading the assignment as soon as you get it. Make sure you understand it and ask questions about it then and there, or at the next opportunity. Save yourself from murky uncertainty about the assignment and the cycles of anxiety and avoidance that uncertainty triggers. Save yourself the embarrassment of having to ask questions about an assignment you’ve had for a month the day before it’s due. Spare yourself the misery of writing an essay that doesn’t satisfy the assignment, only to discover you have to start all over again. Read the assignment. Read it again. Reread it several times during your writing process to make sure you’re on track.

Listen and take notes when the instructor explains the assignment. Ideally, you take notes on all the important and fascinating things your instructor and classmates say in class (and refer to your notes as you write your papers—this too will help you suffer less). But if that’s too much to ask, and if you can’t bring yourself to focus and take notes at any other time, do it on this one occasion.

Break it down. Your writing instructor might guide you through a scaffolded process of prewriting, brainstorming, researching, drafting, and revising. But even if your professor doesn’t require you to do it, breaking down the steps of the process into discrete tasks allows you to schedule progress in smaller blocks of time that fit more easily into a busy schedule. The essence of most personal productivity systems—the ones that all those CEOs and billionaires use—lies in breaking large tasks down into smaller, more manageable ones. Writing is no different. There are myriad ways to carve up writing tasks; the other chapters on process in this volume explain process stages in more detail. Process stages don’t just improve your writing, but also make it less painful.

Just focus on the content of the assignment. If you find yourself trapped in a cycle of anxiety and avoidance, escape it by forgetting about all of the circumstances and just focusing on the content of the assignment. If you’ve been assigned a paper on frogs, and your internal monologue goes something like, “Oh no, I started too late, and why did this professor have to assign this, and I don’t have any ideas, and I’m so tired, and I don’t want to do this, and what’s going to happen to my grade if I don’t do a good job, and hmm, let’s see, how will a bad grade affect my GPA and my job prospects, etc., and what are all the circumstances of my life and my character flaws that have brought me to this point,” just stop and think about frogs. You are not writing a paper about your paper-writing neuroses; you’re writing a paper about frogs. Switch off the “OMG I have to write this paper” channel, and switch on the “frogs” channel. The frogs are your friends.