3. Drafting

This is the hardest bit. Writing takes time. It can be exhausting. It can also be—often is—joyful, liberating, and full of infinities. There’s no short-cut. Unless you’re outsourcing yourself to Generative AI (which is a debate for another time), the way an essay gets written is by someone, somewhere doing the writing. And the writing won’t start until the writer starts writing. The difficulty often lies in taking that first step. All essays begin with a first word or sentence, and most of the time those first words and sentences aren’t words or sentences we’d want to leave unchanged. This is why I tend to call this part of the process drafting rather than writing. Writing can be scary. Drafting, by contrast, has a reassuring temporariness to it—you can draft, and redraft, and then redraft again. The secret is that good writing is really just rewriting. Writing is drafting (and redrafting). The most seemingly effortless prose is usually achieved with a lot of toing-and-froing. Good writing is what comes out of, or is left over from, the rewriting of increasingly less inadequate drafts. 

Oh, and perfection is a mirage. Without selling yourself short, aim for the best version you can of ‘good enough’. 

Filling Things Out
You’ve got your structure. How do you fill it? You can start at the beginning, with your introductory material, and write from there to the end of the essay. But sometimes this isn’t the best approach. A confession: I find it psychologically impossible to write an essay linearly, starting at point A, going to point B, to C, and so on, until I reach the end (point Z). I just can’t do it. Linearity, in this sense, trips me up. I prefer to begin writing an essay somewhere in the middle—at point J, for instance, or point Q—and then to write around that point until a section of argument falls into place. I then repeat the process at a different starting point—at point D, say—and repeat it again, and again, gradually and incrementally populating my essay with material. 

How and When to Write
Write a little often rather than a lot quickly. Some essay-writers like to leave everything to the last minute, and sometimes make a success of this. I can’t recommend such an approach, though I recognise that it works for certain people. I tend to think, though, that such people’s lives would be easier, and their work better, were they to write in a slower, less pressure-cookered way. A tried-and-tested method is to write a little—about 200 words max.—each and every day for whatever duration of essay-writing commitment you are pursuing. Were you to write fully polished prose at the first effort this means you’d need 20 days to write a 4,000-word essay; most people, aside from those lucky few who can say what they mean perfectly at the first go, will need longer. You may find that starting with 200 words a day leads to a routine in which you can write more words at a higher quality on a daily basis, thereby shortening the overall turnaround time needed to hit your 4,000-word total. Whatever works for you. The point is that shorter chunks of writing, done more often, amount to a less rushed, more flexible writing pattern than lots of words done really quickly under a looming deadline. Make your life easy (or easier). 

Tips
- don’t write your introduction first—write it last; it’s hard to introduce an essay when you haven’t actually written it, and thus don’t know fully what you’re introducing
- take the time properly to craft your conclusion—don’t leave it until the last minute; treat it as an integral, essential aspect of the drafting process
- don’t try to perfect a sentence—you’ll never perfect it; get the sentences down on the page, and then return to improve them in the polishing phase
- try to write a little each day, every day—get into a routine of little bits, often; this minimises urgency and makes the task more manageable
- start writing sooner than you think you should—the best time to write is now, and you’ll probably generate ideas in the writing itself (inspiration is made, not found)