Last week I wrote about how a deadline — a deadline that means business — can help a writer focus and avoid procrastination.
But writerly procrastination can have a deeper, psychological source, one that touches on the very reasons we writers are impelled to write. It’s an insight I’ve carried with me ever since I first heard it articulated at a West Coast writers’ conference many summers ago.
It’s Not Easy to Let Go of a Book
It was the last day of the Community of Writers workshops up in the Sierra mountains. Everyone was getting ready to head home to their writing rooms. The closing speaker, a successful novelist, wanted to give his audience some encouragement.
Finishing a book– letting go of a book — is not easy for writers, he told his listeners.
That’s because when we first get that idea for a book, we have such big, gleaming plans for it. We envision a work in which the language will sing, the plot will dazzle, the characters will get up and walk off the page. It will be perfect.
That “idea” is what inspires us to write. Something big and beautiful shows up in our psyches, and we want to nail it down, put it into words, and present the thing back to itself in all its beauty.
I Write. Therefore, I Procrastinate
But the closer we get to finishing a manuscript, the clearer it becomes that what we’ve written is just a book. A pretty good book maybe, with some glints of transcendence, but like ourselves it’s is well short of perfect.
We aren’t Shakespeare, it turns out. We’re just us’ns.
And that’s when the procrastination sets in. We don’t want to finish that book, because then we’d have to face up to the fact that our glorious project is only an OK, pretty good project.
But — come to think of it, maybe even Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare. Maybe he had a heck of a good editor. Maybe he had lots of good editors. Or perhaps he crowd-sourced his work.
Maybe he never finished anything, but kept one ear to his audiences, writing and rewriting his plays until they couldn’t help but turn into masterpieces.
But enough of writing about writing! It’s time to do some of it. There’s a book waiting for me, an idea that’s still in its youthful, hopeful, gleaming stage.
Three years ago, I wrote this post about my husband Jon: “It’s Jon, the Old Guy, I Miss the Most.” I still feel the same.
It’s summer, wee containers of fresh berries are showing up in the stores, and I’m as worried as ever about “The Sad State of the Supermarket Strawberry.”