Procrastination takes all sorts of forms.
I’ve
written about some of these before, and about we can do about them, but I want
to mention a heavyweight one that arises.
This is
where you find yourself saying that the story just doesn’t have the wings to
fly, that it’s too much like everything else you’ve written, that the
complexity of it will never make sense. Might as well abandon it.
That there
are better things in life to be doing.
This is a
tough one to deal with, because there are always ‘better’ things to be doing.
If you’re of a hedonist mode, this can mean spending more time enjoying
yourself, not struggling with some half-baked story.
Or more
altruistically, you know you should be helping other people, you should be
making the world a better place. This doesn’t need to be on some big scale: it
can be as simple as getting a housebound person from A to B.
Or, for a
Christian who writes, you can find yourself saying you don’t think this is
really what God wants you to do with your time. Check out this essay by James Sinclair
for some good thinking on that.
Any one
of these seems like a valid excuse, but the result is that even if you put your
story metaphorically in the bottom drawer, and cover it with a heap of other
things so you don’t see it, it will still nag away at you.
Be brave
and tell yourself the truth. You’ve mostly stopped because planning the story,
even at a moderate level of planning, is extremely hard work. Your brain
doesn’t like hard work, therefore it would prefer you to make seemingly valid
excuses to stop.
So what
to do?
The answer
is simple, but needs courage. Tell your brain that nothing is ever achieved
without hard work, and remind it that you’ve been through this before, and you
may have to go through it again. But abandoning the story is not the answer to
your problem.
The answer
to the problem is…hard brain work.
Get on
with it.
Mike Crowl's latest book, published late 2023, took five years to write. A good deal of that time was spent in overcoming procrastination.
