Procrastination Pays Off
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Writing
I may have finally found the tool to get me writing every day! Typically, I have a feeling in my body that says I want to write, but that feeling gets drowned out by all the voices in my head that say I don't have anything to write about, and even if I did, nothing I wrote would be any good. So I find ways to procrastinate. I especially like it when Hans turns on a recorded episode of Charlie Rose just as I'm heading up the stairs to the computer and I hear a voice or a sentence that interests me and end up sitting on the couch for an hour watching the root-of-all-evil-machine that sits above our fireplace.

But, tonight, I need to be doing work to get ready for a book fair where I'm representing Winged Willow Press tomorrow, and, while I came home and marched right upstairs without even getting dinner first, it is now 9:10 p.m. and I have yet to do any real work.

First, I wrote an email to Kathy who sounded a little overwhelmed and depressed the last time she and I talked. In the email, I told her about a silly exercise I did once to make myself feel better when I was feeling depressed and had very low self-esteem. So I had to go find the journal in which I had written the exercise. Then, I got sucked into reading the journal, or at least the first half, which was about all of the events in my life that had led me to that particular dark place. Now, I was depressed. All the things that had made me feel small and sick to my stomach all those years ago, still made me feel small and sick tonight. I went downstairs in search of a man to hug me, and Hans, with no complaint, got up from his episode of Charlie Rose and indulged me, which made Kaija jealous. Hans picked her up and we made a Kaija sandwich, which made her happy and helped me, too.

When I came back upstairs to my office, my mind was still in procrastination mode, however, and I suddenly felt an urge to write down a scene I'd been imagining today. It is a very small scene that involves only about four lines of dialogue between two people who haven't seen each other in a long time and is something of a stereotype reversal. I gave myself 10 minutes to write down the bare bones skeleton of it, just so I wouldn't forget it, and told myself I would get to work immediately after.

I wrote for an hour and ten minutes.

So, the key to getting myself to write is to bring home work that I want to avoid doing!

The work isn't difficult or scary, but I put in a crazy day today chasing lots of details in lots of directions, and, as Chad insists, I probably have ADD anyway. (Go Bouncing Brains!)

Somehow, the scene actually became a story. It started out with me writing it as though it were stage direction, describing a man and a woman, without giving them names, and the scene in which they were meeting. But then I started going into backstory, filling in details that described their overall relationship and the last time they saw each other and hitting highlights that brought it to the present moment with the man standing outside the woman's hotel room door about to knock. It's a shitty first draft that jumps tense like crazy, but it's three pages and there are a few sentences and some images that are inspired. And, in my typical form, I had to go and make it difficult. At some point I realized I was writing a story. Then I realized that it was actually going to be possible to write the whole story referring to the characters as only the man and the woman and he and she. Then I realized it was going to be possible to write the whole story about the man and the woman in present tense. Sure, it's not my signature second person present tense, but it's difficult and crazy anyway.

And I'm very happy to be writing again! So far this week these are just little pieces here and there that may not go anywhere, but the writing muscles are being used! Life is being lived! I am being me.

Stray thought: Should I refer to my office as a studio, instead?