"Plodder" describes me so well, it's not even funny. My high school had these evil things called timed writings. You sit in the class for 90 minutes and turn in your essay at the end. (I believe the idea was that they knew our parents weren't writing them for us that way.) High school english teachers also, for the most part, do not recognize that essays can be anything other than a five-paragraph essay with a three-part thesis (though they won't be upset if you split the body paragraphs). Furthermore, a paragraph must be at least a certain number of sentences (usually seven or nine). It was a good rule for most people, because they wrote short simple sentences; it was bad for me, because I tended toward long compound-complex sentences (often including appositives, dashed phrases, and if I was particularly enjoying myself, multiple levels of parenthetical phrases [like this]), and was forced to either cut them apart and make it choppy or write a lot more, but I digress.
Once, everyone else in the class (all "swoopers," which is how high school teaches/expects one to write) had finished and I was still working on the introductory paragraph. One of my English teachers actually called my house and told my parents that I was being stubborn because I couldn't think of anything to write. Luckily, my parents thought it was funny, and that she was...a few trees of forest. (which is true, IMO)
Out of necessity, I learned to pace myself a little better and finish writing at the VERY end of class, but before that I would usually sit for about half an hour with nothing written, come up with an introductory sentence, rewrite it, write the second sentence, decide I hated both sentences, rewrite them, add a third sentence, change the first to better accomodate a point in the fourth sentence I was about to write, and so on. Of course, after I got the introduction done, the rest was usually easier for me, except writing a good introduction. If in a hurry (which was most of the time), I'd follow their advice and just repharse the intro, and this worked reasonably well most of the time.
At any rate, quite frankly, the work of the majority of the "swoopers" ranged from bad to mediocre. I was among the best writers in my grade, and the only 2 or 3 who were better than me were also "plodders," just not as extremely. Most of the time that I got points taken off of an essay were for not putting the correct heading or forgetting to write a title. (I had a teacher once who said "Never write a title until you get to the final draft," and that stuck with me, for some reason.)
The fun part was when we got to essays that we did at home. (I did this sometimes in timed essays too, but not as often or as well.) I liked to amuse myself by thinking of the most bizzare analogy or allusion I could, and working it into the paper in a logical manner. So, for instance, when asked to compare two books, I likened them to two different types of pastries. When writing about Gothic tales, I mentioned Scooby Doo. When asked to define a hero, I spent a full paragraph on hero sandwiches (and the teacher loved it). I've even used Dungeons and Dragons on multiple occasions. (I have a funny story about using Dungeons and Dragons to get out of English assignements, but that, as they say, is another post; I also have one involving Julius Caesar and a graphic hack of Pac-man.) Sometimes I would find a random word in the dictionary that I didn't know and try to work it into the paper. This sort of thing actually helped me to write faster, because although I wasted half an hour thinking about how I could write about Scooby Doo, it got me thinking creatively.