As unglamorous as it may sound, as rude as it sounds to my own writing, as much as it sounds like fishing for a compliment. It’s none of those things. Writing is taking a million thoughts and somehow putting them down onto paper. Neurons fire faster than that. My brain is busy. Most of the time, if there’s something in my head, it’s not going to come out the same way on paper.

So a lot of the writing process is playing catch-up. Trying to chase the brain’s great idea back down even though it’s gone almost as fast as it came.

To write, there’s a lot of trying to grab flash in the pan ideas. A lot of it feels like being a child watching a balloon float away and jumping to grab at the ribbon before it’s too late.

But once the string is in my tiny hands, grasped in small, clumsy fingers, I write the idea down, effectively tying the ribbon in a knot around my wrist so it doesn’t go away. That’s when it becomes effective.

Once the idea is pinned to me, my process can begin. I take the ideas I have and shape. Then reshape. Then throw it all away. Then dig it out of the trash and uncrumple it. Finally I throw it away—again—and start over.

A lot of the writing process comes down to pinning down an idea and trying to find the way it’s going to come together. Sometimes it takes minutes, sometimes it takes hours. Either way, it never comes out right the first try. If it does, something is wrong.

But regardless of how much it makes me want to tear my hair out, I write it anyway and just hope that maybe I’ll love it long enough to leave it alone.

... because there’s really no other way to explain why I’m always doing my work so damn close to them.

If you give me a set time to finish a story by, it doesn’t matter if I’m free for the entire 24 hours before it-- I will find some possible way to push it off until the last possible moment.

And yet, somehow, one of my greatest talents is my intrinsic sense of knowing exactly how long a given assignment will take me, and then starting it that exact amount of time before my deadline. Every so often, it bites me in the ass-- but almost always, it works.

I wish I didn’t work this way. I’ve really tried to amend my procrastinating ways. I’ll isolate myself from all my friends or hide my cell phone from myself. But I always somehow find a way to not do the work.

But even if I sit down three hours or so before a deadline, I will almost certainly wait to start till an hour or less before it’s due. Something about the pressure of knowing it’s grind time gets my blood pumping and pushes me to do the absolute best I can. Yeah, occasionally there are some minor errors or typos or what-not, but my brain is only able to create its best content under stress.

For a while, I’d listen to music while I write, but now I find is distracting most of the time, so I only listen to an album if I’m writing a review of said album.

I also can’t do my work in absolute silence. Something about it is too still for me and makes my brain wander. I need a bit of noise and chaos to surround me and keep me still.

Earlier in class, when asked about a specific line by an author that I could recite by memory, the first one to come to mind was James Joyce’s stunner at the end of “The Dead” in Dubliners:

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

What strikes me most immediately about this line is the sound, even before the imagery. “His soul swooned slowly” flows out of the mouth at the volume of a whisper, and it conjures the image of a little ghost swaying to and fro within Gabriel Conroy’s body.

As the sentence continues, “f” sounds come to the fore, but rather than a harsh fricative like we might normally expect, Joyce gives us “falling faintly” and “faintly falling,” reversing their order for double effect, and generating the image of snowflakes falling everywhere over a dark universe.

This line taught me that sound can be every bit as important as imagery. Words themselves can sound either harsh or mellow, and how we arrange them gives an overall piece a tenor and character. Combined with rich imagery and other sensory details, sound can immediately transport the reader and keep them strung along by the effusion of words.