by altairprime | 2025-08-04 22:56:30+00:00
Being one of those students and with a career under my belt of process analysis and coaching, I have an interesting observation: I harness free time as an explicit part of my writing process, rather than something that interferes with it.

I write at about 1200 words per day and I considered each fo the major multi-week assignments in my entry-level English courses to be worth no more than one day of my time apiece. For the finals, I gave them two days apiece, because I wanted an extra day to define the scaffolding for my argument.

My mother indicates that this is how she went through college too; very occasionally, a serious paper would require more effort than this, but for the most part it was “load assignment into brain, study assignment mentally until T-2d, write assignment, submit”. If several essays are due, then they have to be staged at various days numbered T-2d through T-5d for example — and it’s really important to not depend on T-1d existing at all due to courseware/internet/power outages.

I could technically write a worse essay the day it was assigned, but ultimately, I’m turning in A-tier work by this method. The hardest lesson was that I have to try not to wait until T-1d, because there’s a lot of risk encoded in that and it outweighs the value derived from having an extra day to think about it while I do other things.

But it wasn’t about “free time slipping away” — it’s just that I’m writing crap throwaway work that doesn’t matter after it’s done, and so I can barely motivate to care relative to literally anything else in my life that matters. Thus the T-2d compromise: I’m not about to give them precedence over literally anything, but I will concede that I do need to do so one day early, however boring it feels, because I’d rather have a crap day at T-2d than the same crap day at T-1d with the unproductive anxiety of risking a class-retake if my internet drops out.

Notably, when I actually genuinely care about what I’m writing, I’ll spend weeks researching sources and studying arguments and selecting quotes and then assembling it all over a couple days into a work of art — but assembly day is still always as late as possible in the time window assigned, because by then I’m most able to think and write about it efficiently and with a minimum of frustration. Not a zero of frustration, that is — I am a grouchy writer — but I’m healthy-grouchy on T-2d and bitter-grouchy on T-1d, so I do make the effort to put in my writing that day early now.

So: for your coaching efforts, try working with students to construct a working calendar that has non-writing activities in the leadup and then writing activities at the end. ie assuming a 7-day window,

T-7d: Assignment given: Read the assignment. (Seems obvious; is not obvious!)

T-6d: Think about your argument during your free time, while playing games or out at coffee or whatever.

T-5d: Try to construct a very halfass outline on a piece of paper. One sentence per argument you’d like to make, draw arrows to rearrange them. Not complete sentences, not punctuated, doesn’t have any structure at all. Point is that trying will help brain coalesce.

T-4d: Research references for fun. End up with far too many. Start highlighting quotes to yourself using highlighter or digital tools. If you’re going to experiment with a new tool, get it working and productive in 2 hours or discard it and do something shittier.

T-3d: Bind quotes to your argument phrases from that halfass outline. This may force reorg of outline; cool. Compile Works Cited from whatever you end up using so that you don’t have to fuck around with it tomorrow.

T-2d: Write paper, referring to outline / phrases handwritten note. Do one paragraph at a time. Plan to spend your entire day on this with 1 hour away from desk handling bio/sanity needs for every 2 hours at desk. Enforce that upon yourself.

T-1d: Finish whatever writing you didn’t feel like you were prepared to write on T-2d. Ideally try to do this earlier in the day than later, since that every hour you let this slip towards midnight l measurably increases your chances of a life outage causing you to fail the class.

The point of this schedule is to bake in the daydreaming / slow cooker aspect of the creative process but to keep it on the rails. I play video games extensively when I’m thinking about a paper because I can feed my literary brain the assignment to simmer and then go occupy my reflex brain with the game. I usually end up having to use some T-1d time but I’m getting better at managing my life’s dependencies ie. Food and Water and Sleep so that I’m more reliably at T-2d completion :)