My name is Jeff

…and I’m a Procrastinator

By Jeff Salter

Topic: To what degree does procrastination affect your writing projects? Do you have any theories about WHY you procrastinate on certain projects… or at certain periods?

I found several great-looking links to articles about the causes of procrastination… and suggestions on how to reduce / minimize that unproductive trait. I’ll try to get around to reading those actual articles tomorrow, maybe. Or next week. Well, late August is a possibility. Oh, crud… they’ll still be accessible after Christmas.

LOL

Folks, I’m a chronic procrastinator.

My name is Jeff and I’m a procrastinator. I experienced my most recent procrastination about 17 minutes ago.

Yep. This topic – suggested by me – is near and dear to my heart.

For much of my life – as student, in the military, and in my various work environments (including journalism) – I’ve been able to crank out the required results by the expected deadlines. [Though some of those times, it was literally at the very last gasp before the deadline.]

But when the deadline has been too far off, or too vaguely stated, I (typically) just couldn’t seem to wrangle all those elements I need to get it going. Those elements would include interest, motivation, and excitement (on the front end)… then, curtailing distractions and external commitments… finally, concentrating.

Generally speaking, if the project was something I didn’t want to do in the first place – such as MANY assignments during my working career – it was even more difficult to get the wheels rolling. Conversely, if it was something that interested or intrigued me, I could often dive right in.

But What About Writing?

In fiction writing, however, I’ve found that even if the story is one I AM excited about, I do worse if I have a deadline than if I just stumble into the groove and keep typing until I keel over.

Here’s an example from a few years ago:

With one publisher, I had a deadline to submit a manuscript by June 30 (of the following year). That gave me nearly 10 months to draft it, revise it, get feedback from my beta reader, revise it again, and submit it. In August and September of that year, I cranked out around 9600 words — a fairly decent start. However, I was also working on a completely different story for much of that autumn, including the several exhausting rounds of edits. Then, I had my income tax preparation to deal with. Along the way, there were some significant family upheavals (far beyond the scope of this blog) that took an enormous amount of my time and attention. Suffice it to say, that I wasn’t able to hunker down and get rolling on that draft until early April of that next year — seven months since I’d touched the story! That gave me hardly 11 weeks to draft the additional 40,000 words, revise it all, get feedback, revise it again, and submit. I was stressed to the max!

In a completely different example (a few years earlier than the story just mentioned), one without an external deadline, I got really excited about a new story concept, and wrote ‘til my fingertips were screaming… cranking out my novel’s 50,000 word first draft in 16 days!

No procrastination for that story!

What made the difference?

Not completely sure, since both stories were great concepts and I really wanted to write both. The biggest difference was that – for the 16-day example – I got in the groove, stayed in the groove, and didn’t stop for ANYTHING.

Observations

I was a lot more disciplined in my writing schedule prior to joining Facebook in Jan. 2009. Since then, I spend way too much of every day on FB — writing my own posts (including movie reviews), commenting on other peoples’ comings and goings, and generally just “piddling” [a word my Dad often used to describe unproductive time / activity]. That’s an area I truly do want to work on — to discipline myself to fewer FB log-ons and less time during each log-on.

But maybe I’ll work on that tomorrow…

Ha!

[JLS # 548]

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