I had a friend at university who, upon being set an essay question, would immediately go to the library and take out as many critical works on the author or text concerned as he could. He would put these books in a pile on his desk and leave them there for a number of days. A couple of days before his essay was due, he would read bits of some of them. A few hours before his essay was due, he would look at the question. His idea was that somehow all that he had absorbed would magically coalesce and lead to him being able to answer any question. I don’t think it always worked. Nowadays, I suppose, my friend would probably browse the web rather than sack the library for every book, but I fear that he would still do anything to avoid that moment of truth, leaving it as long as possible before actually sitting down to look at the question.
In a moment of characteristic honesty, a student admitted to me that she never planned an essay. She would, she explained, decide broadly what the essay was about and what aspect of her knowledge it reflected. If she thought about the question, it was largely to identify whether it was ‘the genre question’, or perhaps ‘the woman question’, or maybe ‘the kingship question’, and then she would start writing immediately. Her essays certainly had decent moments. They were, however, usually over-long, involving a lengthy, throat-clearing preamble. The outlines of a relevant argument would sometimes emerge, usually somewhere around the middle, too late to be developed or interrogated fully. The essay would come to an end without ever seeming to actually begin.
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