A writer - from aspiring to multi-published - is someone who wants to write and so does write. And yet for many writers it’s a lifelong struggle to convert the want into the deed. For every writer who’s smugly certain that their procrastinating peers just lack backbone, there’s one who’s exhausted by the daily fight to get themselves to Get On With The Writing.
This post starts with thinking about what kind of procrastinator you are - because not all procrastinations are visible - and then moves on to unpick what’s actually going on underneath, to help you manage yours.
What kind of procrastinator are you?
Procrastination takes different forms - some more instantly recognisable than others - and it’s worth getting to know which way it tends to take you:
The run-of-the-mill, bored-and-I-don’t-want-to prcrastinator
Writing is the opposite of the instant gratification that smartphones, the internet, the pub and the fridge offer us. (That links to one of my favourite-ever posts on procrastination, by the way) Even the most glorious flow of writing a scene that’s working really well takes sustained effort without immediate, concrete reward, and some stages of writing a novel are dull, difficult or both, just as some parts of life are dull, difficult or both. With both, being bored with your writing project, over time, may point towards the need for change, but most of the time patches of boredom or difficulty are natural and inevitable, and writers learn to live with that mild discomfort.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash The it’s-not-a-good-day procrastinator
Unquestionably there are days that you’d booked out to writing when the virus, the horrible Other Job stress or the lack of fuel and bandwidth mean you’d do better to throw in the towel and take a day off. But do the stars in charge of health, work, home and mascots really have to align so perfectly before you’re capable of finding the focus, rising above the discomfort, and getting on with it?
