Until this year I had always thought of myself as someone who could think and write very quickly when it came to academic work.
I've never had trouble reaching a word count before, and I've never turned in an assignment late.
This year, however, I've been working on my honours dissertation and for the past month I haven't had any classes.
So, every day I have nothing to think about other than my dissertation.
Aside from the fact I've never really been the sort of person who finishes things early and I've also never been a think-as-I-go sort of person either.
If I'm going to write an essay I have to know as much as possible about the topic before putting pen to paper.
There's no space in my head for words analysis to be happening at the same time.
Naturally, I have been thinking about my dissertation since the end of last year, and since that time it has changed form a number of times.
The research process started very early this year, and since then I have trawled through more articles and books than I can count, stuffing little bits of information into the back of my mind and the pages of my pink, watermarked One Direction notebook.
But because the scope of a dissertation has always seemed so much bigger than the scope of anything else I have ever written I have put off actually putting words on paper.
Of course, I toyed with a few things, wrote a few introductions, refused to commit to any one thing, but for the most part I just left things to settle in my brain.
Now obviously this is a problem when you have a lot of words to write and not much time left in which to write them, particularly when you are not a very linear thinker.
The book I'm writing my dissertation on, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, is essentially non-linear, non-cohesive and entirely fluid.
So it is strangely fitting I should allow my thought processes to carry me all over the place to the point that I am suddenly realising I don't know where my work starts or where it is going to end.
Some people, it seems, can just sit down and begin to write and just trudge through the process of understanding step by step. I envy these people.
Looking at a page and wondering in what order the thoughts are going to come out is stressful and time-consuming.
It's not the writing that is hard, it's the stress that I don't have enough time to write everything I've already worked out because it took me so long to think of everything that there isn't any time left.
Until I started thinking about how I work I always just assumed I was someone who left things to the last minute, and to a certain extent I am, but possibly that's not entirely it.
In class there's always that time during the semester when you ask other people how they're going on their essays.
I'm always the one saying, ''well, I've sort of started thinking about it'' and feeling like I am 10,000 miles behind everyone else because I never have anything cohesive until the very last day.
Maybe just thinking about it isn't leaving it to the last minute, though, and it's just that when something takes an entire year to write it means the thinking process is going to be longer and the writing process even more convoluted.
Hopefully, at least, I'll sort out a year's worth of research into nice, linear paragraphs and I won't be still working right up until the deadline.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
