Habits for Student Writers: Where and When to Write

Writing essays causes students a great deal of stress. And the work is scarcely easier for parents, who often feel their children’s worries even more than the children do themselves. For their good — and, for the sake of those loving hearts that so often sit up late in the copilot’s seat to give one last edit to the final draft — I’d like to lend a hand. What can you do for your student writer?  What helps, and what hurts? I’ll do my best to answer.

This is the first post in a series that Megan has asked me to write. We hope to assemble it into something official — a sort of “CSC Writing Guide for Parents.” In the meantime, we’ll use each short post to dwell on some part of the writing process so that our readers have a clear and thorough sense of how and when to help.  

Turning a writer free to write an essay without the proper habits is like turning her out onto a soccer field with none of the right practice: the experience is certain to be painful and simply must end in misery.  But a glorious thing happens when a student-writer has the right habits in place: she discovers that, at its core, writing is a kind of play.

She will learn that even the most academic of prose is motivated by the same playful, artistic spark that charges the work of a musician, or a painter, or an athlete. It is the life within the toil — the thing that takes work and all its rigors and turns it into joy.  

Writing is indeed very hard, but few of the tasks that matter in life — skilled labor, professional work, childrearing, homebuilding — are any easier. But students learn to dread the work as irrationally as a young child learns to dread a monster under his bed. Why?

Procrastination is the cause. Students dread the hard task of writing, so they leave it for last. By the time they begin to write, they cannot think playfully, or even rationally, about their work; all such thought is drowned out by the din of anxiety and exhaustion. By dawn, students have something wretched to show: a shaky, unpolished essay — a document as delirious and sickly as the awful night spent writing it. But they fail to understand that writing does not need to be so dreadful — and that it should, in fact, be pleasant.   

Here’s how to start:

The best time to write is in the morning.

In the summer, I do all of my writing in the morning, after a cup of coffee, some reading, and a light breakfast. The work is pleasant and fruitful. It makes me feel inventive, because the worries of the day won’t have worn me down, and at ease, because, with the entire day ahead of me, I can afford not to think about my other work — like Adam early in the morning, with all of time left to me for work and play.

In the meantime, I let email and housework be the victims of my procrastination; I can whip through them later in the day and not fail at the work (as I certainly would fail if I were writing). And, if I can put in a healthy amount of time at the keyboard, it enhances the rest of my day: I’ll enjoy whatever else I have left to do because it feels like a reward from the hard word-work of the morning. If I were to reverse that, doing my easiest, most pleasant tasks in the morning and saving writing for the night, I would sour everything with guilt and worry.

The school year complicates my advice but does not undo it. Does your student have a free period before lunch? She should use it to write. Can she write a few lines while she drinks a cup of tea before school? She should.  

“I’ll enjoy whatever else I have left to do because it feels like a reward from the hard word-work of the morning. “

And of course, there is no better time to write than on Saturday morning. Why? Their minds are well-rested. They feel free from the rest of their schoolwork. They have no need to rush to meet a deadline. No circumstance is so likely to produce good and playful prose.  

Do your students doubt my advice? They always do — until they try it.

The second best time to write is right after school — or (better) — right after sports practice. 

If your student cannot help but to work on a paper after school, she should do it first of all her homework, while the sun is still up, while there is time to play with words, and before the rest of her homework drains her cleverness for the day. The goal is merely to keep the work of writing pleasant and easy and to keep from ever having to do it while exhausted. 

What if her cleverness is already drained from the day? She should run, or play a hard game of basketball, or go to track practice. Hard physical work brings cleverness right back.

If she has a great deal to do, she should save her more systematic work (math and science) for immediately afterward, and she should do her reading after dinner, as a kind of rest.

What’s next?

The next post in this series will take a closer look at how to budget time during the writing process.

Ian Atherton teaches literature at Golden View Classical Academy in Golden, CO. He works closely with students in various grade levels and believes that literature is valuable because it reminds us that life — any life, in any station— is worth living.