Discipline, Structure, Momentum & Fear

I'm a procrastinator, to the point where it's almost obscene. I write many of my first drafts all at once, most in 2-3 sittings, usually within 12-72 hours of my due date. Don't tell anyone. I always make it in time, but there's something about the adrenaline that comes with pushing right up against a deadline that helps drop me right into the zone. I'm a junkie.

I have no discipline.

Or at least, I have no discipline without structure. I'm terribly ashamed to admit it. I graduated in December, but I attended a community college night workshop during this past Spring semester. I needed the structure. I learned a lot, and I had a great time. But my biggest reason for signing up was that I knew if I didn't, I wouldn't write...or at least, I wouldn't write anything resembling a complete piece.

If there's one thing---and actually there isn't just one thing, only a million things---that I want to learn during my MFA, it's how to structure "writing time" into my unstructured life. How to make myself responsible for it. How to make it an organic, unquestioned part of my life. When I'm in school, or when I have some kind of an outwardly imposed deadline, the writing happens. When I don't, I always find an excuse to avoid the writing.

The woman who instructed that workshop I mentioned earlier said something, towards the end of the class, that really stuck with me. She was recounting something that one of her MFA professors said to her. I guess she felt, at the time, kind of like I do now---like the problem was that she lacked the proper amount of "discipline." But her professor pointed out that she didn't lack discipline, at all. She was putting all kinds of hard work and dedication into other aspects of her life. (I won't tell you what, but let's say it was tap dance, for example.) It was the writing itself that was the thing, the problem, not the discipline. Realizing that changed the way she looked at writing's place in her life.

I think I'm the same way. Writing scares the crap out of me. It does.

It doesn't make sense, because I love writing. It's the thing that makes me tick, I feel most like myself when I'm in that writing "zone." But I'll do almost anything to avoid it, unless somebody else tells me that I can't. For instance, I'll write this blog post, which doesn't count as actual "writing." I'll organize my internet bookmarks. I'll read craft books, and tell myself it's part of the writing process. I'll scan photos, I'll read over old journal entries, I'll spend hours doing family history research. I'll clean out the fridge. Anything, anything.

Sometimes I meet people who don't have this problem, and to be honest, they kind of scare the crap out of me, too. I admire them fiercely, I wonder what it is they got that I ain't got. Courage? Maybe the Cowardly Lion is my patron saint.

I love love LOVED this LA Times article, below, by J. Robert Lennon (MFA fiction faculty at Cornell.) I see myself in it, so much. It makes me feel better about how ridiculous and hopeless I am. At the same time, it also reminds me that even if most of the time spent during "writing time" isn't actually spent writing, it's still important---crucial---to schedule that writing time in, somehow.

I need to learn to make that commitment, to put writing first. I want to, more than anything. I really believe that being in this MFA program will help me learn how to do that. My life will be centered around writing. And that's the thing---the more I write, the more I write. I've noticed it at several moments in my life. It's like momentum slaps my fearmonsters in the face, like I'm too busy to notice how terrified I am.

And when that happens, I write. And I like myself. I'm going to learn how to get there without the crutch of outside pressure.

Now's the part where you say: So what the hell are you doing?

Put down the blog, put down the blog!

The truth about writers

What do they really do with all that time?

By J. Robert Lennon, June 21, 2009

Ask a writer what she values most in her creative life, and she is likely to respond, "Time to write." Not many of us have the luxury of writing full- time; we have spouses, families, day jobs. To the people closest to the writer, "writing time" may seem like so much self-indulgence: Why should we get to sit around thinking all day? Normal people don't require hour after continuous hour of solitude and silence. Normal people can be flexible.

And yet, we writers tell our friends and children, there is nothing more sacrosanct, more vital to our intellectual and emotional well-being, than writing time. But we writers have a secret.

We don't spend much time writing.

There. It's out. Writers, by and large, do not do a great deal of writing. We may devote a large number of hours per day to writing, yes, but very little of that time is spent typing the words of a poem, essay or story into a computer or scribbling them onto a piece of paper.

Recently, I timed myself during a typical four-hour "writing" session, in order to determine how many minutes I spend writing. The answer: 33. That's how long it took to type four pages of narrative and dialogue for my novel-in-progress, much of which will eventually end up discarded.

Let's assume that this was an unusually brisk day. Let's estimate that, in general, I spend between 30 minutes and an hour writing, on days when I'm writing at all. What this means is that, even at my absolute peak of productivity, I am actively writing less than 5% of the time. Considering how many days of the year I don't write at all (most weekends, all holidays, teaching days, sick days, days of self-doubt, hangover days, bill-paying days), I could easily revise that figure down to 2%.

Should such a person, a person for whom writing consumes 2% of his life, even be called a "writer"? Given this logic, here are some of names by which I might more legitimately be referred:

eater

sleeper

bus rider

naked girl imaginer

child reprimander

internetist

cougher

But back to those four hours a day, during which, on those days when I do write, I am supposed to be writing. If I spend less than 25% of that time engaged in the act of writing, what do I do with the rest of it?

To answer this question, I surveilled myself during a recent writing session. The results are below.

8:04. Subject says goodbye to older son leaving for school.

8:05. Subject turns on laptop and sits on sofa in pajamas.

8:05-8:23. Internet.

8:23. Subject lets cat out.

8:23-9:07. Internet.

9:07. Subject lets cat in.

9:08-9:15. Really fast typing.

9:15-9:17. Subject makes toast.

9:17-9:30. Subject eats toast while rereading article in local paper about rural UFO cult.

9:30. Subject puts extra pair of socks on over extant pair of socks.

9:31-9:35. Deleting.

9:35-9:40. Re-creating deleted text almost verbatim from memory.

9:40-10:26. Internet, including 20 minutes spent writing, revising, and ultimately abandoning angry Internet message board post.

10:26-11:14. Intense self-doubt.

11:14-11:31. Subject showers, dresses (including two new pairs of socks).

11:31-11:49. Really fast typing.

11:49-12:01. Bathroom break.

12:01-12:05. Frenetic typing accompanied by quiet sinister chuckling.

12:05. Subject saves file, turns off computer, makes sandwich.

As you can see, writing makes only brief appearances in that chronology. Indeed, it would be easy to make a case for "non-writing time" as an alternative, perhaps superior, designation for what is presently called "writing time."

The truth, of course, is that writers are always working. When you ask a writer a direct question, and he smiles and nods and then says "Well!" and turns and walks away without saying goodbye, he is actually working.

[...]

To allow our loved ones to know that we are working when we are supposed to be engaged in the responsibilities of ordinary life would mark us as the narcissists and social misfits we are. And so we have invented "writing time" as a normalizing concept, to shield ourselves from the critical scrutiny we deserve. Indeed, even writers who don't write fiction are engaged in the larger fiction of imitating normal humans whose professional activities are organized into discrete blocks of time.

If you have any questions, please write them on a postcard, slide the postcard between the pages of a library book, and return the book the library. I will get to them when I'm finished writing.

Lennon's most recent novel is "Castle." He teaches writing at Cornell University.