Breaking out of the Bubble?

While writing our third essay, I've begun to notice some changes in my normal approach to writing.

While each of us have different methods and approaches to writing, I think what can be said for most of us is that we always start with our own, unique approach for each and every paper that we write. What I mean is that, most likely in high school when we start more intensive writing, we create a kind of recursive formula for writing that we begin with for each new paper we must write. For example, I know some people always start with mapping out an outline, like our high school teachers always told us to do, and then proceed to write the paper once the general ideas are outlined. In the actual writing process, some people will perhaps start from beginning to end and put down all their ideas, like a stream of writing, and that is what would be called their rough draft. Others may just start writing whatever comes to mind, even if it's the middle of a body paragraph, and proceed writing in this scattered way until all the pieces have been written. In any case, we generally tend to go about writing a paper in the same way every time, because that is what we are comfortable with.

For me, my usual "formula" is to sit down, read and understand the prompt, and just think about what I want to write about for a while. Normally, some kind of argument or insight comes to me fairly quickly, and then I think about what support I would use that would form the body paragraphs. Then, once I have a general idea of what to write, I begin writing, always in a linear fashion: beginning, middle, end. I start with my introductory paragraph containing my thesis, move onto the supporting paragraphs, and end in a conclusion. Additionally, I have a hard time writing "rough" drafts. I'm a very slow writer because I tend to be very picky about how I write. I'm particularly bad at just writing whatever comes to my mind; this lends itself to very slow writing because I need to be satisfied with how I've worded my sentence and if it's clear or too convoluted or cliche or prosaic etc etc. (As I write this now I realize I am rereading every sentence I'm writing and forcing myself not to dwell too long because it's supposed to be a blog and I should be writing my actual essay right now). It can take me over an hour just to get my introductory paragraph the way I want it. Hence, I seem to have an OCD like inability to just spit out a rough draft. I've used this general approach for every essay I've written since junior year. Until now, that is.

While writing this essay, I struggled (am still struggling?) just to formulate a clear argument. As I said before, normally I can think of what I want to write pretty quickly (one of the few things I'm pretty quick at). But I find these prompts are on a much more difficult level, partly because they are very broad and mostly because the poems they deal with are much more abstract and hence it is much harder to compose a clear, definitive, and consistent argument. Because I've had trouble formulating my starting point, the point after which the rest of my essay normally unfolds, I've found that my usual formula just isn't as applicable to this situation. So, I've kind of had to step out my bounds or my comfort bubble if you will, and tread into new waters. I'm taking a scattered approach - just writing what I can and then seeing if I can piece everything together - and not worrying about perfection, because quite frankly if I write how I usually do it would not only take an inordinate amount of time but I may very just end up scrapping it in the end because my thesis isn't even fully developed. Unless the long awaited afflatus comes, this will invariably end up being my first truly rough, rough draft.

Anyway, I would elaborate on this a bit more and then conclude how it's probably a good thing that I'm stepping out of my comfort zone and exploring new methods of writing, and that it would probably be beneficial to all developing writers to do something similar, but this is already getting a bit long winded and since I've already spent too much time writing this and not my essay I should sleep so tomorrow I can bang my head all day on "Spring and All".