To [drafting] Infinity and Beyond…..

One of the things I struggle with as a writer (and by that I mean someone who has to write something from time to time, as opposed to some pompous claim about my artistic credentials) is self-doubt.  That sentence almost seems ironic.  Do I negate the irony by ignoring it or by highlighting it?  Er….where was I??

Anyway, I often find that, when writing assignments, I tend to get very bogged down.  I think this is partly down to something I may have referred to before, my own personal anxiety about being ‘found out’.  Exposed as a fraud.  That people will discover that I am just a kid from a state comprehensive who got lucky and bluffed his way to university.  Maybe it’s down to my working class roots, who knows?  Now I am pretty sure I have written something like this before.  Please don’t search my blog to laugh at me.

Whatever the root cause, it is a bit of a drag.  It takes me forever to decide if my written work is in any way complete.  So much so, that I can draft and re-draft until the cows come home.  I am currently in the process of working through my fourth draft of an assignment on Marketing Services.  This module is equal to the value of a princely 10 credits.  Yep, half as much as other modules.  And yet I still insist on tinkering around the edges.  I know it seems ridiculous but I tinker away regardless.  I’m not quite sure why I think this would help.  I’m pretty sure that I am not going to gain a whole batch of marks for just simply re-arranging the order of the text….or substituting a couple of words for one alternative.  It’s not as if someone is going to give an assignment a distinction for replacing the words ‘as a result’ with ‘therefore’.  Or maybe they will.  Maybe if I had changed them over I would have got 70% instead of 65%……..

I know this tinkering is pointless but still I do it.  Even after all this time on the course, I still haven’t got to grips with the idea of drawing a line under an assignment and sending it off.  If I’m like this with a 10 credit module, how on earth will I cope with the dissertation?  I could be re-drafting for months!  I’ll be heading towards the ultimate deadline (that sounds like a show starring Ross Kemp…) and still be redrafting my survey/questionnaire/whatever the hell I am going to do for my dissertation.

I’m sure I am not alone in this.  In fact, that is the main reason I wrote this post in the first place: to reassure others that you are not alone.  Of course, I could be wrong and it is just me that suffers from this.  In which case, may I apologise now for wasting your time reading a tedious post about my writing process.  Just think of the things you could have achieved instead of reading this.  You could have tinkered some more with your assignment….changed a ‘but’ to a ‘however’.  And instead of writing this, I could have finished off that fifth draft……

In the meantime, I’ll try to come up with a blog post a little less self-indulgent.  Maybe I could talk about the project I have been involved with.  Hmm, I haven’t done that yet have I?  Well, I’ll leave that for another blog post.  Although, if you are intrigued visit here and here.  I’ll tell you more about it at a later date.  Yeah, I know it’s a cheap attempt to keep your interest in this blog, but I’m not afraid to cheapen myself for spurious reasons.  Er..on that note…..