What Sophie Said

All over Twitter at the moment I’m seeing people moan and fret over writing their dissertations. Some are proud of themselves for powering on through and some are in that period of despair where you think you’ll never possibly be able to write enough words, or make them make sense. I feel your pain. I handed in my dissertation almost three years ago now, in May 2013, and thought I would share five of the lessons that writing process taught me. I was studying English Literature, and my topic was a prize for short stories by African writers. I was proud of the final piece, but my goodness it took hours upon hours of work, and I know if I tackled it now I would approach some elements differently. ONE. Planning is everything. I know this may not help for those of you approaching your deadline, but for people with it coming up over the next year or so, please prepare. You have a long time to write it because you need a long time to write it. The process of coming up with a...

In many ways I’m a very organised person. I’m a planner. My diary is like an extra limb. I remember ideas, plans, suggestions. But sometimes (often) there are tasks which I just will not get done. There are some tasks on my to-do list which send my procrastination skills into overdrive. It’s such an odd way to be, because there are certain things I put off, but then the organised side of me gets so frustrated and is screaming at me to get them done. With some tasks, I can’t go to sleep until I’ve crossed them off my to-do list. With others, I’ll transfer them to the next day time and time again. It’s the way I’ve always been, and it really confuses me how I can be so on the ball with so many things, so efficient and so organised, yet with others I just let the time slip by. It’s certainly annoyed my parents a fair amount of times over the years! With certain tasks, I can become the queen of ‘I’ll do it later’. And it’s so frustrating. It’s frustrating if it affe...

Anyone who knows me will know how important this item is to me: Every year I have an A5 diary, with an entire page for each day, and it contains EVERYTHING. The amount of to-do lists I make inside these pages is obscene. You’ll see the spine is taped up; that’s because the cover fell off about four months into the year because of so much opening and closing and being thrown into every handbag. I love knowing what’s coming up, noting down friend’s birthdays. To-do lists. To-buy lists. To-visit lists. To-read and to-watch lists. I’d probably write lists of lists if I had the time and the space. When I was struggling the most with my anxiety, these lists had got what you might call ‘out-of-hand’. I would obsess over their contents, and panic when things weren’t ticked off. I’d feel so overwhelmed by the contents that it would be hard to focus on anything or do anything. So things wouldn’t get ticked off. And so began a vicious circle. Now...