Procrastination is Process
How I stopped worrying and learned to love not writing
Writers, we are stumped. We are blocked. We are riding the infinite scroll to hell. We are cleaning things that haven’t been cleaned in a decade. We are trying inbox zero. We are scouring Etsy for vintage patterns, in case we ever learn to sew. We are running out to Home Depot to see if the Halloween decorations are out yet. We are—horror of horrors—procrastinating.
Show up to the page, we tell ourselves! Sit in the discomfort! Write a shitty first draft, fill an inch of space, set a Pomodoro timer. Stop making excuses and just write!
Or—not.
What if we kept making excuses? What would happen?
Image: The Knight’s Dream (c. 1650) by Antonio de Pereda. This guy took a nap instead of finishing his book, and now there’s a skull on top of it.
Procrastination is process. I don’t mean it’s a part of the process, in the sense of sometimes you just have a bad day, or failure is good for you, or every boom is followed by a bust. Procrastination just is process. More than that: it’s progress.
My coach, Cherie Dikelsky, used to tell me that work and not-work are the same. It took me a long time after our sessions were finished to wrap my brain around that. Don’t we all kind of think, deep down, that we’re too lazy to be real writers? Raise your hand if you dodged the Protestant work ethic and failed to absorb the myths of capitalism. I’m waiting.
* * *
It’s possible that when I was younger—pre-pandemic, pre-kid, pre-grad school, pre-perimenopause, pre-life—sitting in my chair and refusing to let myself get up until I had written a bunch of words worked. I honestly can’t remember, because my brain has been fried to a crisp by all those things. The point is, it stopped working at some point, and I hit a wall.
That’s when I came up with the motto, All carrots, no sticks. We’ve all read that one Modern Love where she dolphin-trains her husband to pick up his dirty socks off the floor, using only positive reenforcement. This time, I would be the dolphin. No more self-flagellating, no more shame spirals; instead, I’d reward myself with pastries for pages, a trip to the thrift store for every chapter finished. Only, somehow, after spending all day achieving the bare minimum, the idea of a pastry had lost its luster. It just didn’t seem worth leaving the house for. And after a few days of this, I’d lose momentum again, click over to social media, and then wallow in self-loathing for the rest of a molasses-slow day. Sometimes it worked okay. The carrots were definitely an improvement on the sticks. But at the end of the day, they sort of started looking like the same thing.
When we push ourselves too hard, we risk sinking into anhedonia, the inability to take joy from the things we usually love. We can sometimes power through and wind up writing something, and maybe it’s even good. But that kind of writing will eventually exhaust us. Joyful writing is its own power source. If we become so depleted that we lose the ability to feel pleasure in a pastry, how can we possibly find joy in something as hard as writing?
Procrastination is there to help you find your way back to pleasure. For me, sleep—as much as I can get—is usually the first step. If I get enough rest, I eventually detect some tiny, childlike desire for a petty or mindless pleasure. Eating a bag of chips in bed, playing a video game, listening to a podcast, binging a TV show. If I indulge that stupid impulse, I eventually start wanting to do things that take slightly more energy, like reading or cooking or taking a swim. Slowly, the desires become more creative, and I wind up making something—a poem, a doodle of a tattoo I’ll never get, a Substack post. And then it happens. My desires lead me back to the page. When I open the file, I write, not a few words at a time, but a torrent of words. The trick is, I cannot skip a step. I have to do whatever the hell I want, to the extent that it’s possible and doesn’t harm others.
Example: Yesterday, worn out from sending my son to kindergarten for the first time, I found myself totally stuck—even on my “cheat” novel, the book I’m secretly writing as a relief from the novel I’m supposed to be writing. I knew what I needed to write, but I just kept opening the file, staring, and then sliding into the germ-ridden ball pit of my Instagram feed. I tried switching tasks to a book that usually inspires me, but it was too hard, too virtuous. I was too tired and emotionally jittery to sleep, even.
Desperate for pleasure, I grabbed a book I’d bought on a whim months ago at a Murder By the Book event in Houston—Iain Pears’ 1990 art forgery mystery The Raphael Papers. It had nothing to do with any of my own novels, but I’d heard of the guy, and the book had a nice cover. At home, I tossed it on top of a stack of other impulse-buys and endeavored to forget my moment of weakness. But yesterday, I craved the candy of a gorgeous cover.
Image: Raphael’s The School of Athens, 1509-1511. Nice painting, Raphael!
The Raphael Affair is delicious. The prose is impeccable, light as air and yet crammed with gossipy allusions to famous paintings and art world politics. After several chapters of immersive and humorous museum hijinks, I started to feel good enough to take a belated shower. And then, still buzzing from the book, it hit me: Why not write that next scene, the one I’ve been blocked on, in a museum? It’d give me nice scenery, coded language for my characters to discuss taboo topics, built-in conflict as they strained to keep their voices hushed, and high drama when they burst out into a argument and got glared out of the gallery. And the beauty of it was, it would be a cinch to get them there—they were already in Houston’s Museum District!
The answer had been sitting in front of me for days, but as long as my brain was occupied with grinding on through my guilt and anger, the pieces refused to fit together. I had to abandon ship, do something irresponsible, allow my brain to relax and work in the background, let my subconscious pull me around by the nose.
To be clear, I understand that many writers do not have the luxury of sitting around chasing butterflies all day, much less doing nothing. Most writers are squeezing their writing time into an hour before or after work, or even just one night a week. As a full-time writer with a home office, I am immensely privileged in how I spend my time. However. The busier I get—the more classes I teach, coaching I do, and freelance pieces I take on—the more I am convinced that procrastination really is process. When I have less time to write fiction, it becomes increasingly important for me to have efficient, self-sustaining blocks of writing time. Joyful writing time. I don’t need to spend eight hours psyching myself up to write one painful sentence at a time; I can spend time on other things, confident that when I am ready, I will write more in half an hour than I have in most days. Leaning into procrastination won’t magically give you extra time, but it can make writing a joy, something you look forward to. The carrot itself.
It’s true that you could probably get the exact same number of words by sitting in front of the page calling yourself lazy for a week! And those words might be as good—though I often find that they’re not. But if you have the choice between a week of pleasure and a week of pain, with basically the same results, why not pick procrastination? Procrastination is process. Choose it. Love it. It’s pointing the way back to joy.
To find out more about coaching and upcoming classes, visit my website, amy-gentry.com, or email me at amyegentry@gmail.com. My next class, “Launch Your Novel: Act I,” begins in September.
I love everything about this post. 💕 Thank you for writing it.
One of my Education professors in college really drove this home for me. That part of any healthy writing process is time and space away from the writing for things to click into place (although I know that you are extending this and noting the way that rest and pleasure within that space can bring us back to writing).
It’s the one thing that sometimes feels nice about trying to write with a full time job. Space is built in and writing is already more pleasurable than work. I find that when I have a forced break because of life and work, sometimes when I come back to the writing, things have fallen into place when I wasn’t thinking about it.