Just Say NO to Not Writing! Six Steps for Outwitting Writing Procrastination

Just Say NO to Not Writing! Six Steps for Outwitting Writing Procrastination

1. Set a timer for ten minutes and assign yourself the task of writing without stopping for those ten minutes on a topic you’ve been meaning to write about. If you don’t have one in mind, use one of these: describe an annoying co-worker or describe a time when someone you loved was leaving or compare the life you are leading to the one you or your parents imagined you’d be leading.

2. Write without stopping. If you can’t think of what to write next from one sentence to another, write the same sentence over and over again until something new arrives. You won’t repeat it for very long before the next image or idea arrives. Our minds don’t really like to bore us, and with permission to just write, interesting things will surface.

3. Now give yourself the freedom not to worry about how what you just wrote will fit with what you are going to write next. Imagine yourself in a situation that for you illustrates what you have just written. Describe that situation. Use a snippet of dialog from the situation. Tell what objects or people are in the room with you. Talk about what you are thinking.

4. Notice how putting yourself in a scene that exemplifies what you were describing in the freewrite causes you to use specifics–dialog, names of objects, actions and people. These hook you into re-living your experience and help you as writer to use illustrative specifics rather than generalize with summaries and abstractions. (Too many summaries and abstractions and you’ll disengage from your writing because it will seem bland.)

5. Now you may use editorial words, words that judge rather than show by writing a sentence that articulates what the scene you described illustrates about you.

6. You’ve created a scene that engages with tangibles and then asserts an understanding. Notice this and commend yourself.

It’s not as hard to get started as you might have thought!

If you are still having trouble, though, with your inner critic, tell that persona:

1. I will not worry about accuracy or poor memory. I can fact check later and the act of writing will in itself help me remember more and more.

2. I will be interesting enough because instead of focusing on the intensity of my feelings, I will focus on tangibles in my subject, the images I can see, feel, taste, touch and smell. They will convey my feelings.

3. I don’t have to appear perfect and neither do those I am writing about because it is in exposing and examining human foibles that we realize our likenesses and most human qualities.

When You Feel Down About Your Talent as a Writer

Think about the people in your life who encouraged your creative life. Did they say how much they enjoyed your letters and email? Did they think your ideas or life lent themselves to a book? Did they send you books to read or bring you to lectures and events they thought you’d like because they thought of you as a writer? Did they read some poems or stories you wrote and encourage you? What characteristics did they notice about you?

Write down what they said to you about your writing. Remember it. When you are stuck or worried about your progress, believe what they said about you and writing.

Now, what are you going to do today to feed the fire?

• Write a letter to one of those people who thought of you as a writer or make up a letter they might have sent you. Try starting with a line about what they are always telling you about yourself as a writer and then catch them up about your writing life and tell them what you plan to do to build that writing life this day or week or month.
• Pick up a book you have that you have meant to or are now reading. After you read one to three pages, write about something in your life that corresponds to what you have just read. Or write a letter to the author about what you have inside you to say that their book is helping you find a way to say.
• Go to a bookstore or library to find some new material that inspires you. Open the book to any page. Write down a passage that pleases you. Read it several times during the day. Then take a snippet from the passage and write your own passage inspired by what the phrase means to you.
• Make a plan to attend a literary reading at a local bookstore, arts foundation or college or listen to a poet or writer on the Internet (American Academy of Poets, The Writer’s Almanac, the Poetry Foundation and The New Yorker fiction podcastsare all sites with poets and writers reading from their work. You might search YouTube.com as well, of course.)

It might help to believe that you had an astrologer do your chart and tell you that you had to have writing in your life. And you believe the astrologer when she says to become a writer. You believe her because today and everyday you take action toward your commitment to and interest in writing. You fit something meaningful about writing into your days and as you stir the batter of your life, you record the phrases you find in that life-batter. You write them down, so they’ll invite you to your desk where you will expand on them, no matter how wild the connections you seem to be making.  All the writers you admire had to start, word by word, phrase by phrase, just like you.