If I had to define my writing practices into a phrase it would have to be “all or nothing”. When I have a big writing assignment to do I can’t just break it up into little chunks before the due date. I have three to four massive chunks that I end up breaking it up in to. When I am writing I have to be in a writing mindset which doesn’t just come naturally. For example, I did the Historical Annotation project in about four or five days of work, but on each day I spent from 4-8 hours on it. I get all of my other work done in order to leave a whole day or afternoon for writing. This allows me to be prepared for the process, accessing the “writing mindset”. I’m not making this up and hope you guys understand that mindset. It’s real for me. I think the down side to this method is that after a couple hours my mind starts to feel like jello, and my writing gets sloppier and sloppier. I honestly don’t really procrastinate, always leaving a couple of days for editing before the due date. The setting I need is a nice table and my feet propped up. Propping my feet up helps relax me and keeps me focused on my writing instead of constantly moving around. I do work on a heavy reward system. Usually I take a phone break every paragraph, or in the case of the annotation project I would take a break every annotation. I also have a constant supply of trail mix to keep the energy up. I would definitely say that I like deadlines because I am a total planner and deadlines allow me to schedule those big chunks of time into my routine. I don’t do any prewriting. In fact, when research is involved, I tend to jump into writing way before the research process is done, adding a lot more editing time in the end. All in all, I am pretty happy with my writing process. If I could change one thing I would pre-write, getting a general guide for what I wanted the final product to look like before I start writing it out. I also wish I could improve my typing skills because they are definitely sub-par and require a lot of backspaces.
