Category: procrastination (Page 1 of 2)

You may also call it Writer’s Block.

1. Write ideas, sentences, words, images, etc. on note cards. Small space and limited commitment. Bar is lowered. Easier to begin.
2. Sit down at your writing desk, get everything ready to go and then offer yourself a real choice: Write or don’t write. No guilt if you choose “don’t write.” It’s a free choice with no shame attached to either option. There will legitimately be times when “don’t write” feels right, and there will also be many times in which “write” feels right. Don’t fight yourself. Writing creatively is fun. Let it be fun and not an obligation.
3. Identify the negative thoughts that are the real cause of the procrastination. Here are some of mine: “What if I write something crappy?” and, “I’m just wasting my time. No one will want to read this,” and “I’m too old to be successful,” and “I’ll be bored.” Evaluate–really evaluate–these thoughts. Do they make sense? Redefine things like “success” and “failure.” Make success the accumulation of words (like scoring points in a basketball game). Failure, then, becomes zero points/no words. No more fear of writing something bad; good/bad are irrelevant to success. Or take “I’m just wasting my time,” and consider what “wasting time” really means. Isn’t stewing about not writing and sitting around looking at distractions the real waste of time? How would you like the next five minutes to go: adding words to a piece of writing or scrolling on your phone/stress eating/reading blog posts about procrastination? Which is truly “wasteful” and which isn’t?
4. Test these negative thoughts by beginning to write and see what really happens. Consider it an experiment. Think you’ll be bored? Experiment by writing for five minutes and check to see if you really were bored. If you are, then try the experiment again but write about something else. If you aren’t, well then that is proof your negative self-talk is false. Keep these experiments short. Do them for five minutes. Keep doing them to see what factors impact your feelings and experiences. Change methods and behaviors to achieve greater impact. Make the whole thing into a kind of game or research study on yourself.
5. Embrace your slowness. Slowness can be playful. It can be dreamy. Sometimes you need a dreamy, slow writing session that meanders. It still counts. In fact, stop counting. The writing still happens even if we don’t measure it. Which means it doesn’t help to treat writing like a job. It’s supposed to be fun (even if it is your job). Let your body, your mood, your mind, your whole self have fun and play. Even if you only have ten minutes to write, embrace slowness. Maybe you only get ten words in those ten minutes, but those are ten wonderful words that didn’t exist before. Savor them, enjoy the experience of writing them. You won’t always be this slow, so there’s no use beating yourself up about it.
6. Don’t ever beat yourself up AFTER you’ve written (or before or during or…). That kind of negativity will linger. It’ll infect your next attempts. Here are the ways I beat myself up after a session: “That was crap,” or “Only one hundred words. Pathetic,” or “You’ll never finish, so why bother?” This is that negative self-talk again. Turn it around, stop it before it starts. Remember, success isn’t good/bad but words. Words written means success. Even if it’s only a few. By any measure of logic, even if someone only wrote one word per day, they’d still finish at some point. The only failure is to give up. So, “You’ll never finish,” is nonsense. Utter nonsense. If you’re writing–even one word–you will eventually finish. “Crap” is irrelevant. The measure of success is words. Instead of beating yourself up, celebrate. Even if you only wrote one word. Even if you sat at your desk and decided you didn’t want to write that day. Celebrate. Feel good about how honest you are with yourself and how you don’t want to make your writing into drudgery. You love to write too much to make it something that sucks the joy from your life. Celebrate every word you write. Not with a big party or anything, but internally. Allow yourself to be happy for who you are and what you’re doing. Even those ten words are an accomplishment.
7. If you journal, use it for material. Maybe not word for word (especially if you write fiction), but use it for ideas. I’m often stopped/blocked because I think I don’t have any ideas. But I’ve been writing three pages in my notebook every day for years. That’s hundreds of pages of ideas, ready for the taking. Instead of putting pressure on yourself to invent the next scene on the spot, dip into the journal and read for a bit. Find a word or phrase that sticks, that excites, that surprises, that is usable for something and put it into your story/poem/essay/whatever. You don’t have to start from scratch.
8. Make a list (and keep adding to it as needed) of all the things that excite you about your current project. Start your writing session by rereading and adding to this list before you do anything else. Let the items on this list remind you of why you’re doing this in the first place. Anyone can read or add an item to a list. If this is all you do in your writing session, celebrate. You’re getting closer to discovering all the things that inspire you. That will keep the fuel going throughout the process.
9. Switch up the tools. If you’ve been writing on a computer, switch to writing by hand in a notebook or legal pad. Switch to those note cards mentioned in Item #1. If you’ve been writing longhand, go to the computer or a typewriter. Try dictation for a bit, just to see. Try sketching out ideas or using word webs to make things more “pictorial.” Use prompting tools like RPG random tables, story dice, prompt generators online, or flip open a dictionary, pick a word at random and then see how you might incorporate that word into your next paragraph or scene. Do a writing exercise without any expectation that it needs to go into your WIP.
10. Read a book. Consider it R&D. Reading is just as important to a writer as writing, so you’re not really wasting time, are you? Tell yourself you’ll try again tomorrow (or whenever you have another chunk of time for writing), and that in the meantime, the reading you’re doing is helpful and productive. It’s refilling the well, feeding the muse, adding more words to your word hoard. Reading is a metaphor machine, an incubator, a compost heap. No shame in reading. Never ever. It’s the twin of writing, the other side of the coin. If words won’t flow out, flip the coin over and let some words flow in. And then celebrate your success! You are doing the very thing a writer needs to do. Reading is fun, after all, and so is writing.
11. “Lightly, child, lightly.” “Don’t go about it in a serious way.” Play, play, play, play, play. If you’re playing, you’re living.