That's How I Do It But I Wouldn't Recommend It.

I am not a very productive person in general. I only care about productivity as it pertains to happiness. In other words, I will only be as productive as necessary to make me happy. With pursuit of happiness as my guideline for everything in life, including writing, my productivity in that area varies greatly.

To be more specific, however, when it come to writing papers I do what feels good. If a paper is on something I am interested in, then I have no problem researching for hours, taking notes, underlining, highlighting, free writing, and thinking about it A LOT. What a joy, really. The only problem that I have is pulling it all together, which I do the best I can shortly before the paper is due. I don’t do it because I am careless, but to allow myself as much time as possible to decide what exactly I want to say about the topic. Once I have that clear in my mind, all the material, all the thoughts come together in a short moment of agony of deciding what to cut- “kill you darlings,” just like Stephen King says in his book “On Writing” – and how to arrange the survivors.

There’s a huge flaw to this technique, however. The best example was an essay I wrote once on “The Heart of Darkness.” It was full of great thoughts and ideas that never led anywhere. Even though I was fascinated by the topic, I could not pull it together at the last moment. Perhaps I did not allow myself enough time.

And then there are papers that I could not possibly care less about. In a way, those are a lot easier. I simply approximate how much time I need, mentally prepare myself for the boredom to come, and produce something very mediocre. That’s good enough for me, as long as it meets the requirements. Luckily, there aren’t very many topics that hold that little interest to me. So almost every time I write a paper my life is in a state of complete melodrama, I mean even more so than usual.