Procrastinate now, don’t put it off.
― Ellen DeGeneres
The art of writing is also the art of procrastination, as anyone knows who has put off making progress at the keyboard to dust, reorder the sock drawer or catch up on long-deferred phone calls. The illicit thrill of dawdling pulls us back again and again, and the smart writer takes that illicit thrill and puts it to work: Turn your love of procrastination into an engine of progress.
Writers fool themselves all the time. We make stuff up that we hope we can convince ourselves to believe: If only I can get to the bottom of this page, I’ll be content with my progress for today and will go for a run. Or: One good paragraph, just write one good paragraph, and then I’ll go downstairs and eat the last of Kurt’s amazing brownies. Even with the words of encouragement, progress that day is slow – and by the time we get to the bottom of the page, or finish that one good paragraph, we just might feel a head of steam and not want to stop anyway.
More can be done with the art of misdirection. Whether you have one project or many, there are ways to categorize the writing tasks before you so that one looms large as the mountain to be climbed that day – and the others are out of mind.
Let’s say your top priority is finishing the first chapter of your new novel and you also have, say, a weekly blog that will need writing eventually. You open up the file where you write on the novel, and bang your head against the wall again and again, trying to get jump-started, but nothing happens. Then, in that same boy-I’m-being-bad corner of the brain where you might click over to kill time on social media or play on-line Scrabble, instead you click over to WordPress and start working on the next blog, telling yourself: I’ll get back to my real work for today in a minute! Really I will. In just another minute!
You know you’re failing. You’re making zero progress on the day’s planned work. And it feels good to fail. It feels good to play hooky from responsibility and frolic around outside somewhere else. Then suddenly you look up and – how about that? – your blog is all but done, and at that point you allow yourself to recognize: I got something done. Then, curiously, you turn back to the chapter of the novel, or the other book you’re writing, with the wind at your back, feeling empowered by already having generated some speed and momentum.
No one can make it work all the time. It’s a little like trying to outguess traffic by switching lanes when your lane stalls, then trying to switch back at just the right time: Sometimes it backfires and you feel even more stalled. But I’ve been making it work for years and have talked to other writers who pursue a similar approach. Give it a try. You just might find yourself gaining a new ability to sidestep the blahs and find another gear.
– Steve Kettmann
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