What kind of writer are you?

Often, I feel like I'm mixing bread. My work takes on a shape, but it's still lacking something. And so I knead in a little more flour. I work through some more water. I work at it a little more. I let it sit for a while, and then I work at it and knead in some more elements, as necessary.

That's how I wrote my thesis. My first drafts are always really rough, when I work like that, and it scares anyone who reads them, because of how incomplete they are. But that's just the sticky mess before I start kneading in some more flour.

Tonight, I'm weaving instead. I have a bunch of parts that all need to be put together. But it's not like a puzzle; there are no neat edges and places where things just fit inevitably. No. I'm taking the parts and I'm weaving them together, trying to make them all fit together tightly with as few noticeable holes as possible.

Progress: 3500 words / 15 pages. I'm going to interpret this as "half done," because I really don't want to go past the assigned 30 pages. (Which is funny, because at this rate I'll have a thousand words fewer than assigned. I don't entirely get the assigned 8000 words/30 pages. Maybe I should go a bit beyond 30 pages, because my footnotes are in 12 point. 32 pages it'll be. But I'm still pretending to be half done.)