Welcome to Stress Writing 101, coming to you from your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. My bad, I meant to say your friendly neighborhood journalist. I may be cool but not cool enough to be Spider-Man, or so I say.

You can concoct your theories on whether or not I just so happen to be the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man while I explain stress writing and how to do it. Let’s get into it, why don’t we!

Step 1: Procrastinate until you quite literally can’t anymore.

If there is one thing about being a stress writer, it’s that you are not — and I mean absolutely not — supposed to do anything from 30 minutes to two hours before something is due. Make sure you know how long that assignment is going to take you and plan accordingly. However, if the assignment only takes you 30 minutes to finish, do not do it until 45 minutes before. 

If you do it before, then I make only one request… step out of my classroom because you don’t deserve to learn the ways of stress writing. 

This is a delicate art form that requires rush and frustration. Not cultivating those two important factors means that clearly, you’re not doing it right. I already know you’re going to interrupt your reading to think about this, so yes, there is a right and wrong way to do this.

Gosh, how rude of you to interrupt. Honestly, I can’t believe you just did that.

Step 2: The game plan

Moving on, you need to make a mental checklist of how you want to section your time within the limited time period. I suggest using timers so you can section when you can pee and when you can stress write. 

Let’s be honest, not having a game plan is stupid but having a game plan for how to procrastinate is just…well it’s stupid too, but it’s helpful at the same time.

Pro-tip: bring snacks and a few energy drinks. You clearly procrastinated for a reason. The assignment was more boring than listening to your CTE teacher talk about their kids and how much they loved their previous job! (I’m just kidding of course…maybe).

Step 3: How to stress write

Now there are two different ways that you can stress write; you can brain dump or you can straight up contemplate your life choices at the bottom of the Google Doc.

Personally, I prefer to contemplate my life at the bottom of a Google Docs assignment but that’s just me. Others may prefer to brain dump an entire essay at once. 

To those people who like to brain dump, are you ok? How do you do that? I don’t understand.

And to those of you who straight contemplate their life in the Docs, are they funny? If they’re funny, look me up on the OwlFeed and send me some drafts because the comedic humor I get from mine is astounding.

One more layer of self-inflicted trauma if you will. I’m joking… a little.

Here are some examples of stress writing that I’ve written myself. Now they don’t have to look exactly like mine, they could be extremely different. What matters is you release some steam or you finish your assignment in record time.

“Why do I even do this to myself like this thing is due today and ofc I don’t even start it until today. On the due date!!!!!! It’s like, I like stressing myself out on a regular basis. How did my brother even do this without wanting to pull his freaking hair out all the time like for real this is ridiculous. Or you know this could really just be me being irresponsible and not doing anything that I’m supposed to do on time which clearly makes more sense because you know I literally teach procrastination class 101 with a student of freaking one which is myself of course because who wants to be in a class that I literally called procrastination 101. I swear my imagination is freaking wild. That was literally off top of my head. I wonder what I’m going to be doing in Spanish also why English wouldn’t have been something we were just born with at the very start cause the crap is ridiculous. I have to summarize six different texts. Six! Oooo I kinda wanna watch Six the musical now. Jeezus! I need to get back on track. Also, stress writing 101; make absolutely no damn sense and don’t write informal sentences because yep. Five long run-on sentences are better than ten perfect sentences. Yay!”

It doesn’t have to be funny, happy, mad, sad, or even whimsical in its own right. Your stress writing doesn’t need to look like mine in any sense. In fact, it doesn’t even have to make sense, that’s just how I prefer to write mine.

Like the Looney Tunes outro picture reads, “That’s all folks!”