My Writing Process

My writing process has two sides to it; on one hand, I can spend hours agonizing over a paper scribbling line after line and hating it all, or, I can vomit out a bunch of words on the page all at once, reorganize them into a few decent pages, and not hate it as much. To start off this fiasco, I take a nap. For some reason, good ideas often come to me when I'm half asleep. I never graph or organize my ideas, I just write. When I wake up at around 9 pm, I have an idea of what I want to write, or at least how to start off my first paragraph. I'll probably eat something, watch a bit of t.v., and procrastinate before I start my first paragraph. I give a considerable amount of my attention to the first paragraph, because it guides me throughout the rest of the paper. If I'm writing a first draft, however, I won't put that much effort into it because I like to go and fix it up once when I'm done with the whole project. If I'm satisfied I start thinking of a conclusion. Getting the introduction and conclusion out the way allows me more time to focus on the body, where the more important details are. Throughout the process of creating my body paragraphs, I frequently get side tracked. I will leave the paper, eat, come back, paint my nails, come back, bounce a ball against the wall, and come back again. In about two to three hours, I might have something legible enough to count as a first draft, so I'll sleep again, then wake up at about 4 in the morning to go pee and write something better when I'm finished. Usually, I hate everything I write, but if my teacher thinks it's good enough, I don't complain. The second draft is usually a lot easier to me because I've already stumbled around the pages enough to understand what I want to say. I take the first draft and revamp it; replace words, give better examples, etc. By now, I've probably given up on the paper in its entirety and won't even think about a third draft. It probably isn't the best process, but its shown me my best results as opposed to following some outline.