On Procrastination (Part One of Surely Many)
A nonexhaustive list of things I’ve done in the last few days to avoid editing my draft: played through the newly-launched 4X game Humankind (and lost as the hybrid Franks-British-Swedes); had a five-martini dinner with a friend I haven’t seen in almost a year; took a day to recover from the hangover from said dinner; blogged and did my newsletter; read more pages of my mentee’s draft that I’m helping revise; joined yet another writer Slack group; became too invested in the game within a game of this season’s Rupaul’s Drag Race All Stars; went shopping for the tons of different paper products needed for my upcoming wedding.
It’s procrastination, for sure, and I’ve come up with many rationalizations to feel good about not doing the work I’m supposed to be doing. Yet another nonexhaustive list: There’s enough time to finish before the deadline. Can’t be a writer if you’re not experiencing life. You deserve a break. It’s research! This other thing is more urgent. Being a writer means doing more than just writing. It’s marketing! You physically cannot. You emotionally cannot. Everything is writing. Not writing counts as writing.
There’s procrastination related to writing, and there’s procrastination that’s not. There’s the kind that’s productive, that is somewhat creative, that frees up some time in the future, that will make the words come easier when the writing actually happens. There’s procrastination that feels good, that feels earned and even necessary; there’s some that are not even close, those that end in a guilt and regret spiral.
In the past, I’ve always put off work just enough to still have time and energy to finish, but also not have the end product be a steaming pile. Mostly that’s a function of luck, or maybe my subconscious simply regulates me, pushing me back to work mode before I completely make a mess of things. I’ve never missed a deadline, self-imposed or external, and I’ve also never felt burned out writing (The same go with my day job, but the drives and incentives for that are quite different from writing). But hey, there’s a first time for everything.
For sure these are all not unique to me, or even to creative folk generally, but it feels all new. While I’m on this path of figuring out who I am and how I am as a writer, I’m finding that all these tiny ways to delay and distract are becoming part of the process. I haven’t done this long and though I keep saying that the process for each book is different, after doing this enough times in a row, certain patterns have begun to emerge. Patterns that become habits, that then become a work ethic, that then form a belief system on the creative process. I’m going through a growth of sorts, a refining of these aspects of myself that have mostly been undirected and unexamined. Do I know how or why I’m sometimes not in the “mood” to write? What is mood, even? Do I know if what I’m doing is truly with the intention of making the writing better, or am I just delaying the inevitable? I don’t know, but now I’m at least asking the questions.
Image credit: Tomorrowland photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash