the Lamentable Midterm, round 2

Once upon a time, when I was in group therapy, my therapist said to me that I had a very interesting therapeutic style; I would work intensely on a topic for 5 or 10 minutes and during that time get an immense amount done, more than some people got done in several sessions. And then -- I would stop, exhausted, and float along lightly on the surface until the next period of intense work came around.

I bring this to light, gentle reader, because I feel that is exactly my pattern in working on academic tasks (such as the Lamentable Midterm that I have once again skipped classes to deal with), and I am not so sure that it is a good pattern. To have worked very hard this morning for 3 and 1/2 hours straight through is commendable, certainly, but the afternoon seems to be frittering away in approaches that don't quite pan out, leavened with a sense of general bitterness that I have spent so much time on this paper and am not yet finished. Which bitterness does no good, I might add, for it just makes me less inclined to do the work and more inclined to throw up my hands in dismay and go read the last Sarah Caudwell novel. (Perceptive readers may be able to detect traces of Caudwell's distinctive style in my own prose at the moment; I stayed up a little too late finishing The Sirens Sang of Murder last night.)

I tangent briefly to note that perhaps writing here does do me some good, after all, for when I was stuck trying to find the descriptive term for Caudwell's prose I automatically flipped over to the other writing space to work on something 'easier' -- and that space was my midterm. Clearly my midterm writing strategy at this point should be to try to describe something extremely difficult here in my blog, so that my brain flees back to the midterm as a simpler task. Oh, I wish I knew if I was being ironic!

But where was I? Ah, yes -- fretting about how I am a very slow writer, and how I have been working on this midterm for six days now and am not yet finished. This is, I speculate, not only because I naturally work in the method described above, but also because I accrete text much as an oyster creates a pearl. Each paragraph must be close to correct before the next paragraph can proceed -- and so right now, for instance, I am five paragraphs from the end, but that doesn't mean I have a rough draft I could just shrug my shoulders & turn in, because the second of those five paragraphs can't come into existence until the first is right. Not perfect, but right. As one might imagine, this is a real problem in classes in which one has to turn in a rough draft for peer review; I don't have rough drafts of my academic writing. I have my process, and then close-to-final drafts. (Oddly, fiction writing seems to work a bit differently -- perhaps because there's no logical argument, I can put in entirely wrong paragraphs as placeholders until I've got more clarity.)

However, I say to myself, it is the last year of my BA, and my process does produce papers which receive excellent grades, so I should perhaps just resign myself to doing things this way for the next seven months -- but when I put it like that it sounds like such a long time. Regardless, I am not about to change my process until I finish with this paper, so I must go pay attention to it again. Only 4 paragraphs to go!