We know that giving up goals or resolutions isn’t something that happens all at once in a snap decision. They slip away from us in a thousand little ways and before we know it, so much time has passed and we haven’t made progress. Last week we talked about how the important work that you should be counting and celebrating as part of writing a book—the planning, the research, and just all that thinking. But what about the flip side of that? What might you be doing that’s actually putting off the work that’s going to give you that momentum that will see you through to “the end”? Writers procrastinate in a ways that disguises itself as productivity. The first step to overcoming writing procrastination is to recognize it when you see it.
Why writers procrastinate
The first stage of any book is an idea. Ideas are very sexy—they fill your whole mind with possibilities. Ideas are like a nebulous, unformed cloud of thoughts that you know has some gold in it somewhere. The problem with the idea stage is that you can potentially stay there forever.
The whole process of writing a book is basically moving your idea from a nebulous cloud to a real, concrete thing you can share and others can take in and understand. There are many reasons why writers resist movement in this direction—making something real is scary. Every concrete step you take towards finishing locks it into place. Suddenly it’s a real thing that readers may like or not like. Every step towards finishing is a step towards exposing that idea to other people, so we want it to be perfect.
There’s no such thing as perfect. If we wait until we have a perfect way to share our idea, then it will never leave the safe confines of our minds. If we try to make every decision—where the story should start, what research you need, what flashbacks to include or not, what your key message should be—perfect before we move on to the next decision, you’ll just be stuck there. Overcoming writing procrastination means you’ll have to be okay with imperfection at every stage along the way, so you can move on to the next.
What isn’t Procrastination
Procrastination can be so sneaky, that we want to start to recognize it by being clear of what it isn’t. When we’re making real progress, we’re making decisions. Decisions do take time, and we don’t have to make them all at once. As long as you’re moving in the right direction towards bringing your book to life, then you’re making steady progress.
Planning and thinking is not procrastination—it’s development
The writers we work with are often surprised that the outline and development stage of a book takes. If you’re working on your outline, and that outline is growing and taking shape, then you’re making progress, even if this process takes a few months!
Rest is not procrastination
No one can work on a project around the clock. Nor can a busy adult fill every open corner of their schedule with writing. If you decide how much time you’re able to devote to a project each week, going past that quota may not really be helpful. You need time to walk away and recuperate so you come back to the material with fresh eyes and an energetic mind. If you’re too tired to think…you’re way, way to tired to write.
If you’re not making the benchmarks you hoped you’d be making, but you’re still putting in the time and making some progress during your writing sessions, then you might have just underestimated how long it will take you to do finish that stage of the process. Don’t beat yourself up about it or ask too much of yourself, just adjust your timeline expectations and keep moving forward.
When setting your timeline expectations—don’t forget to factor in weeks off. It’s a long road, and you’ll need them.
Play is not procrastination
If you’re trying to make a decision about your book, playing around with a few options is a great way to see what might work and what might not. The key here is to set very clear expectations about what decisions and ideas exactly you’re playing with in order to make decisions. For example, if you’re working on your outline and trying to decide where to begin and end your narrative, the very crucial book ends of your story, then you might need to try a few options and play with them to how they would serve both your topic and your key message. If you’re in the drafting stage, you might be trying to figure out how best to transition from one scene to another within a chapter. When I’m stuck on this, I like to play with ideas by getting up and walking around, talking to aloud myself. I play with different options until I find that that feels good and then I go back to the keyboard to put it down.
But—once you’ve decided which option feels best, keep pushing forward in making more decisions. You will have a chance to make changes and improvements in revisions. But if you keep returning and repouring the foundation, you’ll never build the house.
What does writing procrastination look like?
Perfection is the enemy of progress. This aphorism should ring true to you because you can see this play out in all sorts of ways in your life. My mom had her own version of this truism: “You’ll never really be done with the laundry unless you are willing to go naked.”
Of course, this is hard to apply to writing your book because your book is so much more important to you than the laundry, right? (But then…why are you sometimes folding laundry when you have clean clothes, but haven’t made progress on your book this week?) Perfection is still the enemy, even when it’s something as close to your heart as your story.
Waiting until you’re an expert writer to start
There is a lot of writing advice available to you. Some of it’s free, some of it are paid programs, some of them are books you can buy. Most of it is good advice written sincerely by people who want to share what they’ve learned from their experience as writers to help people get started.
(And some of it isn’t going to be helpful at all. As a writer who sometimes writes writing advice, my tip for telling what’s not going to be helpful is avoid it if it sounds an awful lot like the newest fad diet—fast & easy is usually smoke & mirrors.)
But even more importantly, there’s too much for anyone to take it all in in a single lifetime, much less before you get started writing your book. Attempting to do so will not only hurt your confidence but also be a genuine waste of time.
If you’re feel like you need to learn some things before you get started, make a list. Make it specific to your project. “What I need to know in order to write my book.” You probably have a better idea of which skills you really need (and which you don’t) than you might assume. Once you’ve made your list, make a plan for how you will check off each item—whether you find it online, buy a book or two, or join a program that seems like it will cover what you need to know—make a plan for how you will check off that list. And then stick to it.
Researching the publishing stage
This is a very similar problem to the one above. There is an insurmountable mountain of publishing advice. Worse, publishing is always changing so the mountain is always growing. Put limits on how much time you’re going to dedicate to preparing for the querying of publishing stage while you’re still writing your book.
For memoirists especially, we recommend getting just a general overview of the different publishing paths (we will have a blog on this next month, so stay tuned!). Then, when you’re about 50-75% through the first draft of your book, then you can start spending a bit more time learning about the publishing process and publishing strategies. The reason we recommend this guideline is because by the time you’re that deep into your first draft, you’ll have a much clearer idea of what your memoir really is (and who it’s for) than when you’re just getting started. The success story of Shoe Dog by Phil Knight wouldn’t have been at all relevant to Tara Westover trying to publish Educated. So when you have a good idea of what your book is, you are better equipped to find books like your own and read them and their publication stories.
Editing partial drafts
Imagine an established, multiple-book writer has book deal with a publisher based on a proposal. The editor is expecting the finished second draft in six months. Should the writer send the first half of the book after three months so the editor can get started?
Of course not! There is a very good reason why no professional editors work with way: it doesn’t make any sense to edit half a book. Before you edit something, you need to revise it. Revision takes in the book as a whole and makes whatever big-scale changes are needed before getting into the finer details in editing. Ergo, you can’t revise half a book, so editing half a book is a waste of time.
Imagine instead you’re a carpenter, building a beautiful, bespoke desk. You’ve done a gorgeous design on paper with measurements. You get about half-way done. You have two of the four legs. Three of the six drawers. Would you then stop to sand, stain, and then polish those pieces? Of course not! All that work would have to be done again after you put all the pieces together, so you’re just adding more work for yourself without making actual progress.
It doesn’t make any sense to edit half a book.
Waiting until everything else in your life is totally under control
We all know how priority lists work. You put down everything you have to do, then everything you feel strongly that you should do, and then everything you want to do. The things at the bottom of lists are things that never get done.
You’ll never be totally done with the laundry unless you’re willing to go naked. Decide what you’re willing to leave partially or imperfectly done, or even not yet started, in order to make the time to write your book. It might not be the same thing every week, but make a plan for what you will let go of to move writing time up in the priorities. If writing your book is going to happen, you’re going to have to let something else fall off the bottom of the list.
