Procrastination ... like posting a topic in a writing forum

Maybe not. But you can certainly type something. Even if it’s just “what the @#$% do i think i’m doing i can’t do this” over and over again. Eventually that gets boring, and useful words start to come out.

That’s why the Internet is such a trap, because chatting with witty intelligent strangers never gets boring enough to force you to do something else. I highly recommend pen and paper in such cases.

Best resources for fighting procrastination, writer’s block, and related maladies:

• Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way – morning pages, artist’s dates, to provide listening practice and fresh inputs, respectively.
• Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird – sh*tty first drafts and the value of a one-inch picture frame
• Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones – keep the hand moving
• Forward Motion Writers’ Community – fmwriters.com/community/dc/dcboard.php – best writers’ site on the Internet, with lots of advice, inspiration, and daily exercises (although note above comment on the Internet trap).

Good luck!

Katherine

“How weird is that? Block and procrastination, as far as I can figure belong to two different species.”

I agree that they may be different species, but I always thought that writers block was something that happened when you were actually writing - you are writing, but you can’t work out how to resolve your characters actions, or you can’t find where the next leg of the journey is going. Words are coming out, but they don’t make sense, and they fail to live up to the precedent chapters.

I think it’s easy to equate writers block and procrastination, but if you aren’t sitting down to write at all because you find intercourse with witty strangers on a forum more interesting, then you’re procrastinating. Turn off the browser for an agreed time and type waffle. You have to start to write first. I don’t think you can have writers block unless you are trying to write.

Katherine, Pink,
Thanks for your responses. They`re much appreciated.

Probably, Writers` Block is a multi headed monster, with varying degrees of severity and many different causes, or triggers, at its root, as well as many disparate manifestations.

There is something I feel I should make absolutely clear: the, pseudo, windup at the top of the page, notwithstanding, in no way am I inferring that people suffering WB, do so as a consequence of dilettantism on their part. Its proffered by me as a probable cause of my own inadequacies and short comings, and nobodyelses.

I came across this website earlier on, it may interest some of you:
archetypewriting.com/muse/muse_block.htm
Take care
vic

I think i have to agree. Now that you mentioned it, it makes sense. Cause only in trying to achieve perfection do we get easily dissappointed and discouraged and stall for time until we end up doing less and less. I guess this gives us a different approach.

You know, I’ve never had any luck with that. Usually that’s a spiral straight down into feeling like I have never and will never write anything worth anything.

And yet, so many people promote it as THE solution to breaking through writers block. Go figure.

My solution so far is to brainstorm. Where can the characters go from here. What are the possible consequences. What action will bring the plot forward. What action will cause them the most trouble with its consequences. I usually manage to find a path for them amid the dozens of ideas I look at, and that is my path through the writers block. Preferably it is a path that involves both advancing the plot and getting the characters in the most trouble possible via an action that they thought was reasonable at the time.

Fortunately NaNoWriMo has helped me realize that my story doesn’t have to be perfect, only that interesting things must happen, and the most interesting things usually involve the biggest problems for the protagonist!

I’ve never had any joy with the “just write any old bollocks” method, either.

Procrastination isn’t just about not wanting to write a certain thing, it’s about not wanting to write at all, for whatever reason (usually fear). I suspect this is why the “any old bollocks” method doesn’t work for some, because it presupposes that you want to write, you just don’t want to write what you should be writing. But I’ve never found this to be true.

So you’re going to have to force yourself, one way or the other. Which is difficult, of course, but then nobody said writing would be easy. Or fun. Or lucrative. Or… but I digress

What does work for me, though, is the “shitty first draft” method, which I think has been alluded to in this thread already, and has certainly been mentioned on this board before.

Essentially, it’s a matter of discipline and forcing yourself to do two things:

[1] Sit down and write what you should be writing

[2] Continue writing even though you “know” it’s awful and tripe and ohmygodmycareerisfinished, etc., and don’t stop to revise anything. Just keep ploughing through, allowing yourself to write the most turgid, dull, unimaginitive prose ever.

[2] makes the forcing of [1] easier. And why should you allow yourself [2]? Because NO-ONE WILL SEE YOUR FIRST DRAFT EXCEPT YOU.

Later, on a day when you’re feeling more up to it (this normally only comes after you’ve finished the entire first draft, mind) you can go back and revise it so that it’s not so shitty any more. And most of the time, you will discover that actually, it wasn’t all that shitty to begin with. You just thought it was at the time.

If that sounds both simple and hard, that’s because it is. But, in my experience, it’s the most common method among professional, working, prolific writers.

which brings us back to the fact that, its all in the mind

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all

Vic

I’m not sure if this helps, but I once heard that Stephen King always MADE himself sit down every day and write at least one or two pages. Even if they stink, you’ll have furthered your story some - chances are you will be able to expand on what you wrote down the road. When I was writing my first draft, I tried to follow that rule of thumb. Every night after work, I would spend 45 mins to an hour just writing. The good thing about this technique is that you don’t get out of sync with your story. If I take too long between writing sessions, I find I have to go back and re-read, which eats up my writing time!

Another technique, especially for scenes with a lot of dialogue, is to just write the dialogue down - don’t worry about descriptive words or sentences. I’ve had a flash of inspiration at the grocery store before, and ended up doing this on my PDA! Or sometimes I jot down really great dialogue at work on a note pad.

I tend to agree that fear of imperfection accounts for a lot of procrastination, at least where writing’s concerned. Sometimes, I find that I also procrastinate because I dread the task I’m putting off (for whatever reason), or because I’m having writer’s block.

All of the suggestions have been very good. Every writer has to settle on the strategy that works best for him or her. I can add a couple things that have worked for me; maybe they’ll help someone else, too.

First, Death to Perfectionism! “Perfect” is the enemy of “good,” after all. And, like Gen. George Patton once said, “A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan next week.” After all, not everything we write is going to be worthy of Pulitzer consideration - and that’s Ok! Really!

When I was a reporter, the knowledge that my editor would yell across the newsroom at me if I blew deadline was a keen motivator. Rather than procrastinate because of writer’s block, especially on that critical first “summary lead” paragraph, I’d write down the first thing that came into my mind about the story I was writing, even if it was silly. Once I did that, the rest of the story would flow, and I could return to craft my lead paragraph later.

For years I suffered from this procrastination thing. Every morning it took me two hours to finally get “into” my novel or the magazine article or whatever I was writing at the moment. It makes me sad to think of all the time that I have wasted.
Then finally I was fed up. I realized: I am going to procrastinate half of my life away if I don’t do something. And now I just sit down and start immediately. No matter what comes to my mind, no matter how stupid, how silly, how ridiculous, how embarassing. I just start. My mind warms up like a good old Diesel engine and then starts running.
So my bottom line is: to stop procrastination you have to stop it.
But everybody is different.

Can’t agree more… You’re absolutely right and I personally believe that we shouldn’t set our standards like the way we end up disappointing ourselves.

You waited 11 years to respond?

This post warmed up mine heart and my coupon team from PickedBox.

Well, this is the Procrastination thread.

I was gonna reply to this, but… you know

Uh… yeah.

None of these tend to work for me… I might be a more difficult case

What you experience may not be procrastination – it might be some sort of executive function disorder, which can result from a number of conditions, including anxiety and stress. I am autistic – anxiety and stress are the order of the day for me – and for over a decade I have struggled with my work being very “bursty” in nature. Back when I was regularly doing technical writing, I could produce 30 pages of work in a single day (our average expected pace was 4 pages per day) – but only one day a week. The rest of the time, my brain was busy thinking about the material I was supposed to write to the point I would dream about it. After that, I’d end up putting out a first draft that only required minor revisions.

Pace-wise, I was still way ahead of expectations, but this caused a lot of conflict with some of my management who wanted to see 4 pages per day. Which of course added to the stress, which added to the executive function disorder. Shifting to a team where my manager understood my work patterns helped reduce that stress.

I still don’t have any effective long-term strategies for eliminating executive function disorder, but the overall approach that I employ now is to try to identify and remove “speed bumps” that make it harder for me to gain inertia when my brain switches into “work mode.” I try to keep a number of small tasks on hand that I can complete in 10-15 minutes, and for bigger tasks, instead of trying to plan them out in detail I break them in smaller chunks, then keep track of the “next action” for the relevant chunks (borrowing from Dave Allen’s “Getting Things Done” time management system.) That way, if I sit down to work on something and my brain skitters sidewise like a chunk of metallic sodium in a swimming pool, I can pick one of my pending “next actions” and get that done. That way I still feel productive, I’m not focusing on feeling like I can’t get stuff done, and I’m actively managing my overall stress. Doing this, for me, helps me reduce the amount of time that executive function disorder can control me. Moving through a series of small tasks creates its own momentum, and I am finding more and more often that I can then ride that wave into getting going on a larger tasks. And once I’m started, it’s easier to keep going.

Actually, while the details differ some, you just described my whole life

Yeah. I’ve gotten way too much practice at being able to in real-time feel that “oh, crap, my executive function just tilted” feeling.

I have always had a long list of projects-- my “stack”-- that I work on in intermittently. I work until I reach a “stymie” and then move on the next item until I’ve done/figured-out whatever’s needed to resolve the previous item and then it’s back on the queue.