You’ve developed an interpretive analytical argument. You’ve planned your essay. Now you’ve reached the point that you’ve probably been waiting on all along: the actual writing or drafting of the thing. Notice that what you’ve been doing up to now falls right in line with the common advice to approach writing as a process—not a one-time action or event but a multi-stage creative activity. It’s three stages are generally called prewriting (what you do before you write), writing/drafting (writing the actual text), and revision (editing and polishing what you’ve written). Up to now, you’ve done lots of prewriting to prepare yourself by gathering material and generating and organizing ideas. Now comes the time to dive into the writing stage.

Write freely

Follow your plan. Trust your planning. Silence or ignore your critical mind, which may rise up spontaneously and make you feel self-conscious or unable to write well. Deliberately shove such feelings aside, and just pour your ideas onto the page, knowing that you’ll be coming back later to make everything sound right and look good and conform to proper rules of grammar, punctuation, and so on. When it comes to your outline, hold onto it lightly. An essay changes over time, often because you think of new ideas and receive new insights about the literary work when you’re writing the draft. Be willing to adapt and adjust the outline to fit the needs of the essay. In other words, start with the outline, and if you eventually find that it doesn’t serve your essay, let it go.