The Art of Cramming: Writing as a Finished Product

I REALLY liked the textbook “Bad Ideas About Writing.”

Maybe I’m just a huge nerd for this stuff, but I feel like this textbook is in a way a culmination of a lot of what we have been talking about all semester. Systemic issues that we have heard about or might have even experienced firsthand in writing are disseminated and discussed at length in brief, succinct essays. I have to say, and perhaps maybe it’s expected, it’s a textbook about writing, but the writing is really engaging and lively. Reading one of these chapters might be quick, but you will certainly be thinking about them long after you’ve finished, at least if you’re like me.

I was kind of surprised when I was scrolling through the table of contents to find a chapter that was entitled “THE MORE WRITING PROCESS, THE BETTER,” by Jimmy Butts. Now what struck me about this is that the all of the titles of the essays, as the title of the textbook states, state bad ideas about writing that the authors will discuss at length. I was surprised because I didn’t expect to see the writing process regarded as something that was bad about writing.

The writing process! You know, the thing that was drilled probably all the way back in middle school. Prewriting, drafting, editing, revising, publishing. I feel like I might have either missed or added a step there, but that’s generally how it goes right? Why would that process be a bad thing? Spending more time on your writing, thinking through these stages delicately and with care, reviewing over your work, it all leads to better, more refined writing, right? And I’ve heard time after time the idea that “writing is never finished,” this idea that we will never achieve the “ideal” for writing and that no matter how much we toil through draft after draft we will never reach the true pinnacle. Even though our work might be finished, it will never be truly “finished.”

As the semester is wrapping up and I once again feel inundated with papers and writing assignments, I start thinking about the writing process again, and how because these papers make up a majority of my grade, I should take time to make sure that I follow the writing process. Make drafts, revise, edit, and then submit after countless hours of work.

Well when finals roll around semester after semester I always am ambitious with myself. I try to come up with a day to day plan of what I’m going to accomplish with my writing in order to make finals time as smooth as possible. Sometimes its ambitious, but every time, I tell myself “stick to this plan, and this will be a breeze.”

Well, it usually doesn’t go according to plan. How it usually goes involves a good amount of procrastination, a dash of cramming, and not a lot of the “prewriting, editing, revising” kind of stuff. I’ll usually have to suffice with just a draft and a final revised copy that I send into my professors.

Is that a necessarily bad thing though? Okay sure, I’ll admit that pulling an all nighter and writing a final paper from scratch probably won’t turn out your best writing. However, I feel as though sometimes essays that I’ve been really pressed for time on and had to cram a bit have been some of my best work. I emphasize having to cram “a bit,” I think there definitely is a healthy amount of “cramming,” or pressure that college puts on that sometimes is healthy. Deadlines are good, they force us to produce work of substance in sometimes a limited time frame.

So I started to think, maybe it’s not what Butts intended, but can this idea of valuing the finished product more than the process itself be applied to situations where the writer does not have the liberty to spend as much time working through the writing process as thoroughly? We would typically assume that those situations result in writing that isn’t as well formed or produced, but is that always necessarily true, or just something that we have been taught and hold as true?

One line in particular that stood at to me speaking to this philosophy is when Butts writes “We cannot follow a writing process because writing is much messier than that.” Messiness reminds me a lot of finals time. My desk will be littered with old papers, books, small little writing sketches or drafts, maybe a mug or two from coffee or tea. My head also feels a bit messy, with ideas cluttered around, no time to think about a proper way to organize or set them aside, but they just exist there until the papers are done, until I’ve exhausted through all of them and picked the best ones, and then new ones appear. Writing is certainly a messy process, both metaphorically and literally.

Butts states that he is “worried that we are taking too much time to write. And time is our most important non-renewable resource.” Maybe it’s just because I’m starting to get older (I say that as if I’m an old man) but I really have started to think more than ever that time is precious. I believe that we should have those times where we rest, but overall, we should seize the day, especially with writing! There is so much to write about that we need to budget our time carefully, spend adequate time on our work but allow ourselves to experience life and live.

In the idea of living and time, Butts writes how “Time is a luxury. Revising too much can be unethical—a waste. There are diapers to be changed. More than that: People are dying. You are dying. And you need to write as though your next piece could be your last.”

Do I think that this rallying cry might be a little be melodramatic? A little bit. But just a little, because he does have a serious point. Lots of questions arise from this. Is the messiness that Butts talks about similar to the waste that he describes later? Can these two be reconciled, or at least opposites? Is there a point where writing without structure and focus becomes too messy and you sacrifice productivity and quality?

I certainly can’t address all of them in this blog, in part because I honestly don’t have the answers to all of them. I do believe that there is a tension, and there isn’t really a right answer to this just like there isn’t a right answer to writing. That might be a bit of a cop out, I admit, but in all honesty, I think in the end, Butts has a genuine point in that we should appreciate our finished products more. Saying that writing doesn’t ever have an end in a way discourages this. We should always strive to produce our best work, but I think respecting our finished products is part of what being human is about. We know we can write perfection, so let’s be happy with what we can produce right?

I encourage whoever is reading this blog to maybe give that chapter a reader if you have the time, and think about it, I’d be interested to see what you have to say about whether writing can be thought of like this without sacrificing anything. We are all students, or have been students at one point in our lives, and I’m sure we have all at least once had a moment where we had to cram a writing assignment in. How did it feel, how did your work turn out?