The words, ‘the rest is still unwritten’, are fun to sing along to when you’re at the Christmas market and a singer begins a lively Natasha Bedingfield rendition. They’re less fun to admit when someone asks how your essay progress is going. This is the situation I found myself in at the end of Michaelmas, when my summative essay was stuck at 500 words for what felt like weeks on end. The rest was, very much, still unwritten.
Indeed, during said trip to the Christmas market, and during said Natasha Bedingfield rendition, my friend turns to me and says, ‘Hey Ellie, they’re singing about your essay! You should put this in your column!’. So here we are. And thank you, said friend, for sparking such stimulating content.
I should probably use this space to clarify that my essay writing lull did not stem from idleness. It’s rather that I suffer from perfectionism and procrastination in equally crippling doses. I’m inclined to think this is probably a universal experience; I’ve received various pieces of advice over the years, all tailored to the slightly stressed student who has an imminent deadline.
During my undergraduate degree, for example, my tutor advised us to leave the essay, eat a lot of carbs, then come back and try again. More recently, I’ve been encouraged to approach the essay armed with a large glass of red wine. In the last few weeks, I’ve discovered a new technique whereby I order a coffee that pitches me ever so slightly over my caffeine tolerance, find a spot in a café without access to a plug socket, and ride the jittery wave of caffeination whilst under the time pressure of my laptop’s dwindling charge. I seem to get quite a lot done. I did contemplate whether this was an unhealthy habit. Then I remembered a housemate of mine a few years ago who relied on a much more illegal form of pick-me-up when they were struggling through an all-nighter. All things considered, I think my double shot latte is probably fine.
There is one piece of advice, though, that has tenaciously stuck with me over the years, perhaps because it’s less transient than caffeine or wine (or, indeed, an alternative stimulant). It feels wincingly icky at first, but hear me out. When I was about twelve, I had a wonderful teacher who wore impressively high-collared shirts, could speak in any accent on demand, and had that unique ability to control a class of children whilst remaining universally liked. She proposed that whenever anything mildly inconvenient happened, it was helpful to utter the phrase ‘It’s my lucky day’. And the funny thing was, it actually worked – not by changing your predicament, but because in saying it, you realised that what was aggravating you was often relatively banal, and that life was, in fact, still pretty groovy.
Obviously, take this technique with a pinch of salt. I’m not saying that ‘It’s my lucky day’ can solve world hunger or help you up when life throws a particularly tricky curveball. It’s sometimes useful, however, when you’re in the essay writing pits and you’ve forgotten what sunlight feels like, or why you ever started this endeavour in the first place. So, in the ‘second draft’ spirit of this column, and because Hilary term has slapped me in the face with lengthy reading lists and essay deadlines, my reflection is that we should all probably mutter this pithy phrase a little more often.
It’s all very well trying to remain positive, however, until you find yourself talking to someone who likes to tell you how much work they’ve already done, and correspondingly, how screwed you are (they don’t say this last bit out loud). We all know a person like this. They’ll say, ‘Oh? I’m actually already on my final 6,000 word draft’, and smile smugly. Isn’t there some sort of statute of limitations about the number of words you’re allowed to tell people you’ve written? Keep it to yourself. Or preferably, tell me that you’re also only 627 words deep and similarly fuelled by caffeine and apprehension.
This is partly why I hate the word ‘productive’. As someone who has pursued academic validation for as long as I can remember, I start to tremble if someone tells me they had a ‘productive’ library session, knowing I’ve spent the last four hours trawling through an abstrusely baffling journal article with little to show for it. Comparison, as we all know, is the ultimate thief of joy.
I think what I hate most about the word ‘productive’ is that people behave as though it has an aesthetic. It’s associated with early morning runs, long library sessions, meticulously planned to-do lists, and matcha lattes poised next to a busy laptop (an image which gets insufferably shared on Instagram stories). I’m the sort of person who works best under pressure; the quiet sense of dread from an imminent deadline, perhaps paradoxically, gets me thinking very clearly. But this sort of motivation is not aesthetic. It doesn’t photograph well. And I still hate matcha.
I wrote the majority of my undergraduate dissertation between the hours of 11pm and 3am. My desk was filled with scraps of paper where I’d scrawl barely legible ideas. Old mugs of half-drunk tea were held hostage on my windowsill. I was so reliant on milk chocolate hobnobs as emotional sustenance that I joked about thanking Mr McVitie in the acknowledgements section (alas, I didn’t). On reflection, it was a bleak time, only exacerbated by the fact I was writing on Thomas Hardy, whose characters are relentlessly miserable. Each night, I’d repeat the same scruffy pattern, the word count gradually crept up, and I was left with a piece of work that remains one of my proudest achievements. But my hair probably needed washing. And I didn’t eat many vegetables. And it definitely wouldn’t have looked good on Instagram.
So here we are, staring down another essay, another week, another term. And whilst I’m on my metaphorical anti-aesthetic-productivity soapbox, I’d like to remind everyone (but mainly myself) that you do not have to spend your morning highlighting to-do lists for it to be worthwhile. You do not have to pomodoro. And you absolutely do not have to drink matcha. On that note, I must go – I’ve got to send a handful of emails, tackle a gargantuan reading list, prepare a seminar presentation, visit the archives, and draft my essay plans. It’s my lucky day!