Procrasti……………………………

…….nation.

The word of the day, or maybe of the year. I tell you what, just sitting here writing this is my form of procrastinating against writing my Nanowrimo words. And it never hits the same way, not like a tomato allergy that you can avoid if you just stop eating tomatoes. Procrastination can force its way into your anxious little head after three straight days of writing like a dream. You can have a project that you really love and still find your mind drifting to all the other things that you should be doing that aren’t the thing that you actually should be doing.

I started writing for Nanowrimo with a story idea that had initially been planned to be a screenplay. I don’t write novels, I don’t usually write long form prose, why the hell would I write 50,000 words when I could write 10,000 words and have a complete screenplay. I mean, the math you guys, the math. And in addition to that, screenwriting what I do. I think in scenes and speak to myself all the time in monologues and dialogues. So why try for the 50,000 words?

The answer could be because I haven’t tried it yet. Maybe I’m curious to see if I will complete the full month or do like we do on a diet and go hard at first only to end up eating a twelve pack of string cheese and two bottles of wine four days later. I don’t know. Do you ever sit with your thoughts and actually discover something about yourself? It isn’t like the movies, the voice-over may be a tacky cheat in a screenplay but at least information is being presented. How I wish sometimes that I had some easy exposition available. Ron Howard’s voice as the hours creep closer to bedtime — she would not hit her word goal that day, or any other day, for many days — at least then I could let myself off the hook and say it was all preordained, out of my control, the voice knew, see, so it was never meant to be.

But nothing is determined for us. And procrastination is just a fancy word for laziness, and sometimes we have to give ourselves over to our laziness. Because if we harp too hard then the thing we’re doing for joy becomes the hassle, and we begin to resent the craft, then our ideas, our stories, then we may as well just crumple into a ball and die. Figuratively.

Hard work is really the key, isn’t it. Giving ourselves over to the pain of it, the insecurity and doubt of creativity and life in a world where there are tons of people doing the exact thing you’re doing with the hope that the way you’re doing it is unique enough to matter. If we think too hard about anything we’re bound to talk ourselves out of everything.

So to procrastination I say:

Hello. I understand your purpose and your pull. I get that you are there in the corner of my mind, tap tap tapping away at the part of my brain that is struggling to discover news ways to string words into sentences. I get that you are hungry and want to eat Million Dollar Listing: LA and then maybe stare out the window for three hours listening to horror podcasts. I get it, procrastination, I do. But what if we just sit down for the 1,655 words I need to write for the day and get it done and then I promise we’ll do all the fun things you want to do. We can both be happy.