This is a thing that I wrote. It's a lot longer and a lot later than it was supposed to be, but both the length and the lateness help illustrate the elements of procrastination as it relates to writing as a challenging endeavour that I want to get at, so I am going to pretend that both are intentional. Working on this long past the original deadline I was given also allowed me to avoid several other things that I did not want to do, so this blog post is about procrastination both in form and in function and serves to illustrate a very small, very sad version of the circle of life. I hope that I communicate an idea clearly here, but as is always the case in writing I have no sure way of knowing, and that is okay.
There is a moment: It's 2 AM, or last time you checked it was 2 but maybe it's 3 now, who knows? Your apartment building is tomb-silent; everyone else has gone to sleep, even that one nocturnal guy above you who seems to spend his entire life watching car shows. You pace, wild-eyed, alone in the night, muttering as you try to conjure the next sentence of your paper out of sheer need. You teeter, balanced precariously between a sense of awful clarity, the feeling that in your witching-hour desperation you've ascended to a higher plain of consciousness usually accessible only to the central figures of major religions and probably Yoda, and the reality that you have not slept in twenty-one hours and are now propelled forward only by a potent but finite mix of panic and denial. I know this moment well. Do you recognize it too? It is, I think, common to reproach ourselves at times like these: How could I have let myself procrastinate so much? How could I let myself fall into this trap? Surely nobody else in my class has made this mistake? We feel ashamed: we have managed our time poorly, and this late-night toil when worthy folk who started the whatever-it-is early are comfortably asleep is our just punishment. Or, alternatively, we feel abnormal: we are powered by pressure, and this frantic rush is how we do our best work, but we know this is unhealthy. I think, though, that this kind of procrastination is really quite normal. I procrastinate all the time. I procrastinated while writing this, and not only so I could make an obvious joke about having done so (although that was part of the reason.) Lots of people, people who do good work, procrastinate either occasionally or regularly; it is not some shameful character flaw that you alone struggle against. I see procrastination as being sort of like The Walking Dead (with apologies to anybody who loves that show unreservedly): very occasionally it's good, usually it's terrible, but good or bad it's not going anywhere; it's just a part of our culture at this point and we must each find our own way of dealing with its stubborn refusal to stop happening — even those of us who consciously avoid it are still engaging in behaviour that takes account of its existence. That procrastination is ubiquitous doesn't make it healthy, but it does make it understandable and manageable and something you shouldn't necessarily beat yourself up for. It's not a crisis, either of character or of anything else, though it can create crises if it goes totally unchecked. Several previous contributors to this blog, including Sarah and Dr. Griffiths, have taken us through some of the underlying causes of procrastination, fun, achingly-human phenomena like assertions of control, fear of doing poorly, and the Giant Snowball of Shame. I can say with great confidence that I have experienced each of these; they ring very true to me. I think those of us who write, either because we have to or because we want to, can be aware of the traps that lead to procrastination and still find them tough to avoid. One of the methods I use to nudge myself toward procrastination-busting behaviours like careful time management and taking the first un-fun steps in a project despite not enjoying them, and take this with a grain of salt because it has in no way stopped me from procrastinating, is simply to remind myself, gently but persistently, that writing is hard. This may seem stupidly straightforward, but the reason I find it useful goes like this: As soon as it becomes clear that I have to write something, I will often do one of two self-destructive things. I will either A: go "well, that looks like a pretty simple thing I can finish in a couple of hours, which means I can spend the next two weeks ignoring it completely," or else I will B: take one look at it and go "THAT LOOKS HARD AND FRIGHTENING AND WHEN I DO A BAD JOB EVERYBODY WILL KNOW THAT I AM STUPID, BACK AWAY, BACK AWAY." Both of these reactions, I think, have a lot to do with temporarily forgetting that it is okay for writing to be difficult. In the first case, I am equating writing with the simple act of typing and forgetting all the complexities that proceed writing an idea down, while in the second I am getting too caught up in those complexities, becoming so absorbed in all the ways I could screw my project up that it becomes very hard for me to in fact write anything. Writing is one of those things that can appear small and non-threatening and then turn out to be almost endlessly involving, like a quiet stream that you discover too late hides a wicked undertow beneath its placid surface: You're not building a bridge or doing rocket science, you're just sitting in front of a keyboard, or a blank page, or a touchscreen if you're a masochist, typing some stuff, so how long can it possibly take? ... except you must first construct the idea your words will express, then break that idea down into organized steps so the reader doesn't choke on it, then take a break and have a snack or go for a walk or watch an episode of something or think about puppies because it's good to give your brain time to cycle, then choose the right words to get your idea across, and then put them in the clearest possible order, and you must do all of this many times in the course of a single project. It's exhausting just thinking about it. Expressing yourself in writing can be a daunting task, even if you're fulfilling a school or work-related obligation rather than articulating your deeply-held opinions. And, while other people can and do help us with our writing in vital ways, whether through encouragement or example or feedback, this task of expressing our ideas successfully is, in the end, up to us: To embark on a writing project of any length is to step onto a lonely road through a dark wood, with only our own powers of communication to lead us out again. It's scary. So we, or at least many of us, avoid: So long as our project is not begun, it exists in a delicate state of suspension in which it might go well, in which we might communicate our ideas effectively, and, whether because we have forgotten how demanding the work is actually going to be or because we remember all too well, dwelling in this schrodinger's cat space in which we have not yet forced ourselves to commit our ideas to paper is more pleasant and less painful than actually doing what we're meant to be doing. This all means that, yes, it can be helpful to manage our time and make certain we don't underestimate how long it takes to do this kind of work or get too caught up agonizing over the pre-writing stages, but I think it also means that we must always acknowledge that when we write something of substance we are trying to do a difficult thing, and respect our own attempts to do that difficult thing. In other words, I don't think we should demonize ourselves when we procrastinate our writing, even though procrastination is certainly unhelpful and a thing we should not be doing. We're not avoiding the work because we're bad students or bad writers or bad people; we've just forgotten how tough writing is, or else remembered all too well, but forgotten that this difficulty is a thing everybody struggles with and not something to be shamed or frightened by. Writing is hard. And that's okay.
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OC faculty, staff & studentsWe made this space available to share our sometimes sorry, sometimes heroic, stories of procrastination. Please scroll down to read all the entries. To submit, send your entry to [email protected] Archives
November 2021
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