FINISHED!

It's finished!  The stressy essay that caused me the 'shame' of admitting defeat last week is done!  It took a good deal of planning and a return to a technique that I used in school but it's finally done and I'm happy with it.  Just going to go over it one final time tomorrow with fresh eyes and then it'll be off on its way down the wires to my tutor. 

The technique I referred to as having used in school was mind mapping - I did it for all my GCSE and 'A' Level revision, carefully drawing connecting lines in different colours, little diagrams of things and so on...anything at all to make the information more visual.  I find things so much easier to recall in an exam if I can do this.  I've never really used it to plan, it was always as a memory aide, so I wasn't sure how well it would work here, but being at a loss for an alternative I thought I'd give it a try.  Here is the (tidied up) final product:

Copyright: me!  :o)

The question is about why 5th century BCE Athenians placed such emphasis on performance and display (yeah, I know...even I wonder why I'm studying this sometimes).  I went through all the source material and made a ton of notes, just bullet points and page references, then started drawing my map, starting with the cloud in the middle, then the Parthenon bubble at the top and working my way round.  The original was a lot messier as I had to join together things that were not next to each other, but the effect it had on me was amazing.  I started writing the essay and found that all I had to do was pick a place to start (I picked the Parthenon again, for ease) and work my way round, incorporating as many bubbles and sub-bubbles as I could.  And it worked!  The essay almost seemed to write itself!  The hardest part was making sure all my references and bibliography were in An Acceptable Format (it seems to change from course to course, which doesn't help). 

So today's lesson learnt is that it's all about the prep.  Do the legwork and the rest becomes a lot easier!  It took me less time to write the essay than it did to do all the background work, and this makes me wonder whether this might apply to fiction writing too.  If I were to plan out every single detail of a story, perhaps even draw a mind map and/or timeline, would the story be more inclined to write itself?  It's got to be worth a try...  ;o)
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