Awfully Hard Work Doing Nothing

I've been procrastinating again so in interest of keeping my deadline I decided to recycle a relevant post from my first blog; From Yesterday's Tomorrow. In a way it grandfathered my earlier post on procrastination, though I had forgotten it at the time.

"Calvin: You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
Hobbes: What mood is that?
Calvin: Last-minute panic." — Bill Watterson

"It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind. -Algernon" — Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays)

"If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done." — Rita Mae Brown

"Never postpone until tomorrow what you can postpone until the day after." — Raoul Wallenberg (Letters and Dispatches 1924-1944)

"As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly."— Paul Rudnick

All quotes courtesy of goodreads.

Writing Actively

Write: actively, brokenly, crookedly, doggedly, effectively, fantastically, gamely, hauntingly, ignorantly, Jovially, kinetically, laughingly, movingly, nervously, openly, pointedly, quickly, ravishingly, superbly, thrillingly, universally, vicariously, wonderingly, xerically, yearningly, zestfully...

And have fun with yourself 

Ten writerish things a procrastinating writer might do:

1. Make a list of things to write about

2. Read advise from other writers

3. Reorganize their book shelf, desk, or filing cabinet

4. Read a book, watch a movie, or start a marathon of their favorite TV show, and call it ‘gathering ideas’

5. Look for writer related pictures or quotes on Pinterest, Google, or in some other store for such things

6. Practice their signature for book signings and decide if they want a pen name

7. Shop for more office supplies and make a wish list for when they publish their book

8. Talk to their characters and do pretend interviews for their future fans, all out loud.  

9. Make a new slip cover for their notebook and wish they could afford a leather one

10. Draw flowers and tornados in their notebook’s margins while waiting for inspiration to strike

These ten things are not necessarily bad, in fact they can be very good things to do sometimes. BUT they will not help if you don’t remember a writer’s number one rule:

1. You can’t be a writer unless you write. 

The Midnight Questions

If the words that scrawl across the page by night were ever read by light of day, what would there be worth reading again? A desperate question, an unfounded hope, a memory fresh as new leaves? Or will the words be as dry as ink on the page?

 Is it all just a flash, here and then gone? Or will something stay, standing out in the morning bright? 

If I had never written, not one word upon the page, would I then find rest, untroubled by these lines? Would I wish it so? 

What words will come tomorrow night, when all is dim and clean? What echos of the day will sound, when night stars wake once more?

Write to Be a Writer

You can’t be a writer if you don’t write. So if that’s not something that you do every day you need to start. Get a note book, keep it with you, use it for any little snippet or idea that comes into your head. Open a word document, start typing. Get a stack of files and save everything you write, everything you’ve ever written.

In January of 2012 I set myself to write every day. I made a rough chart and promised myself thirty days of writing. I made that goal and have only missed a couple of days since then. When I started I was using a standard notebook, now I have a small one for my purse and a six by eight that I take almost everywhere, at the very least it’s in the car. I remember going into a panic one day when I forgot my purse, solely because it left me without paper and pen. Not all my entrees are long, some are just a few words strung together or even just pared up. Sometimes I write fiction, sometimes I make notes about my day, and often I don’t make any sense.

My notebook is a way for me to keep myself writing even when I’m discouraged or to busy to do much. I may not be going very far now, but at least I know I’m moving forward as a writer every day. You see I believe that every word we write makes it easier to write. We learn to think in words, to grab hold of little things and save them for later.

Just try writing a line or more a day. It takes less than a minute and if you don’t like it no one has to see it but you. Just write something, anything.