Procrastination: A Novelist’s Friend or Foe?

You may have heard this writing advice: “Write every day, even if it’s just a paragraph. Exercise your writing muscles. Get in the habit. Stay in the habit.”

But what if this writing advice, like Julia Cameron’s advice for morning pages, is not for you? What if, for some inexplicable reason, you become a novelist who procrastinates? What then?

Should you be ashamed of yourself? Should you chide yourself for your lack of discipline? Or should you embrace procrastination, find the humor in it, and see where the devil takes you?

Finding Humor in Procrastination

My late grandfather Jake Wade was a sportswriter and editor of The Charlotte Observer in the 1930s and 1940s, and later, Sports Information Director at UNC Chapel Hill. He had a popular column in The Charlotte Observer called Jake Wade’s Sports Parade, where he wrote about sports, but more so, about the humanity of the games. A member of the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame and the namesake of the prestigious Jake Wade Award given each year by the College Sports Information Directors of America, he made writing look effortless, and he had a sense of humor too, as shown in the excerpt below.

This excerpt is from a piece he wrote for The Charlotte Observer in 1937 titled “Writing a Column.” It is about nothing at all, or rather, a humorous look at what happens to a writer when procrastination proves to be a worthy adversary:

            You Roll a long sheet of white paper in your typewriter and type in the upper left corner:

            SPORTS–SPORTS PARADE–TWO CO 10 POINT–PROOF TO WADE.” Very neatly.

           Then you wipe the perspiration off your face and look out the window. You see a taximan tinkering with his cab and you believe you recognize him as the        fellow who drove you home the other night and told you a wild tale .

           You get up from your desk and walk into the city room and talk to Legette Blythe a few minutes about the result of the liquor control store election.

           You come back to your desk and sit down and gaze at the long white sheet of paper in your typewriter with the words in the upper left hand corner and then you wipe the perspiration off your face again.

           You swing around in your desk and run through the mail again and you re-read the letter from Johnny Mackorell inviting you to the annual fly casting tournament and trout derby at Banner Elk where you have a good laugh about a story he told of a fisherman who slipped and fell in the pool.

            Then you put in a brand new sheet.

            Suddenly you decide you want a coke and send down for one. Then you wipe the perspiration from your face and get up and go to the city room again, where you rib the news editor about Dizzy Dean and his latest troubles.

            You come back to your office and get your coke and when you finish it, you slap your hands together and whirl back to your desk and turn to your typewriter ready to go to work. You don’t like the sheet of paper in the typewriter and you pull it out and ball it up and toss it in the wastebasket.

            [This routine continues with various self-imposed interruptions and no progress.]

             You get your hat and coat to leave. You take another look at the typewriter and the paper that is in it.

             “I’ll be back and write that darn thing later,” you tell your associates.

             Three hours later, you return and you find the long white sheet of paper still in the trusty typewriter. I few spaces below what you put in the upper left hand corner, just as neatly, it says: “You’re doing fine. Keep at it, bud. You can make it.” And you know that Fritz Littlejohn has been by.

I smile as I think about my grandfather, the great sportswriter, finding ways to avoid writing and then finding humor in it.

I suspect that Procrastination doesn’t like being the brunt of the joke, but that’s okay, because putting a finger on the problem and having a good laugh is a step in the right direction.

The Genesis for Writing about Procrastination 

I realized this week that I have a temporary writing problem called procrastination. I find myself finding other fun and creative things to do besides work on book 2 in my mystery/thriller series.

The real problem may be that I spoke too soon when I told the world that my novel Deadly Declarations published in March is the first in a mystery series. That’s fine to say out loud because I do plan to write a series, except I haven’t made much progress.

I’ve done some preliminary research on book 2, but not enough. I’ve written an opening chapter, but it’s rough, as it should be when I don’t know for sure where the story is going. To be fair, I have thought about the plot, but it is grainy in my head. Frankly, there is much to do on the book and my knowledge about the time it takes to write a novel is not helping me get a good start.

Add to this the pressure of finding out that readers like the first book in the series, the book has more than 500 honest reviews on Amazon, more than 300 honest reviews on Goodreads, and most of the reviews are positive.

And I recently received an email from a reader who said she hoped I was well on my way to writing the next book in the series and one reviewer wrote, “please, please, please write another book.”

Of course, there are a few readers who didn’t like the book–books are not for all readers–but there seem to be enough readers who want more that it has created a little bit of pressure to get on with it, something I didn’t expect as an Indie author. After all, I am not under contract to anyone but myself. I don’t have a deadline unless I create one. And yet, it seems like the write-the-next-book-clock is ticking.

Procrastination Is Like the Villain in a Novel

A good villain needs to stand in the hero’s way. The hero needs or wants something and the villain is there to stop them, to prevent them from achieving their goal.

A writer wants to complete their writing project, just like I want to complete book 2 in my series. Procrastination’s goal is to throw the writer off their game, to make them do something different, to put ideas in their head that sound more appealing than working on their writing project.

Procrastination has offered me options for things to do other than write book 2:

• You have several golf trips planned; you should work on your golf game;
• It’s a hot summer; you should spend more time fly-fishing in the mountains;
• You have a grandson in another city; you should visit and play with him more;
• It’s okay to keep marketing your first book in your series; you should do more of it;
• You’ve launched a new version of your podcast; you should spend more time with it;
• Now is a good time to write the non-fiction book you’ve been thinking about;
• You should read more writing craft books before writing your next book; and
• You should read more in your genre before writing your next book.

And the list goes on.

Even if I could avoid Procrastination’s bigger distractions for delaying my project–which I have so far failed to avoid–Procrastination has a way of pulling me away, like it did my grandfather, for shorter tints for important things like:

• Checking and responding to my “very important” emails and text messages;
• Looking at social media and engaging, because that’s what marketing pros say to do;
• Updating my author social media pages and websites;
• Writing blog posts, like this one, thinking someone may read them;
• Running promotions for my novel and scheduling author events;
• Making and cancelling real life appointments, running errands, and cutting the grass;
• Cleaning and organizing my home office; and
• Looking for almost anything to do that sounds productive because starting a novel from the beginning and knowing what’s involved is one of Procrastination’s best talking points.

In a novel, a good villain should feel real. They should have plausible motivations, and their presence should be felt, even feared.

Anyone who has ever put off a writing project knows that Procrastination looms and has a presence. Procrastination takes up space in the room and in one’s head, and she shows up to taunt and haunt.

Sometimes, in a well spun tale, we feel sympathy for the villain. What about Procrastination?

The Creative Procrastinator

Novelists are creative people; thus, we can be creative procrastinators.

We can rationalize our way out of a problem the same way we can pull our hero from a burning building.

Procrastination is a good thing, we might say, because it allows us to provide space between projects. It allows us to pursue other creative ventures in the meantime. It allows us to have some fun and gain more life experience, which is what bestselling writers say is needed to write the breakout novel. And it allows us to read, which is something writers definitely need to do to write better.

When Procrastination makes her presence known, she is an obstacle. But to a novelist, what’s an obstacle except a juicy plot point to be overcome? A challenge. A thing to be solved before we type “The End.”

Is Procrastination Friend or Foe?

Like the answer a lawyer might give, the answer to the question is: “It depends.”

Procrastination is friendly enough to cause the writer to explore new projects and catch up with old friends, to travel to new places and do the mundane tasks they ignored when writing was all that mattered, and to laugh at the predicament they find themselves in when their excuses are all they have left.

But Procrastination is foe enough to stare at the writer after all their rationalizations have run dry, and say: “Snap out of it, you have a book to write.”

And Procrastination is foe enough to become the friend the writer needs, the reminder of why they loved writing books in the first place.

Identifying the problem and laughing about it is good medicine. It might be what the writer needs for getting started, for putting words on the page one word at a time, until the writing process becomes so habitual again that the writer escapes into a world that don’t want to leave.

But hey, until the medicine takes effect, I have a grandson to visit, some birdies to make with my new golf clubs, and some trout to catch with that new fly I ordered. And besides that, I have some “very important” emails to answer.