Note from the Editor: The following post is taken from Writer’s Time: Management That Works. This program functions with an open enrollment and registrations are being accepted. Are you procrastinating? Putting off today’s writing until tomorrow is not an effective process if your goal is to produce a memoir in the foreseeable future. Why do people […]

Note from the Editor: The following post is taken from Writer’s Time: Management That Works. This program functions with an open enrollment and registrations are being accepted.

Are you procrastinating? Putting off today’s writing until tomorrow is not an effective process if your goal is to produce a memoir in the foreseeable future.

Why do people opt to procrastinate? I suppose we can’t really say they “opt” as in they make an active decision. As with other addictions, people generally “slip” into procrastination as their thoughtless reaction—“thoughtless” as in “no thought given to it.”x

Are you “lingering”? Or are you “procrastinating”? 

There is a process which I call” lingering” with your story or idea. Lingering occurs when you need some perspective on your story and are not getting it. You have written your story but you realize something about it is evading you. If you stayed with it longer—like if you let a soup simmer—you believe you would get a fuller flavor.

So you put your story aside, but you do not abandon your memoir. You do something else, all the while letting your story “simmer.” Perhaps you even forget about your story when, of a sudden, it occurs to you what tone you need for your story or what one of your characters might contribute.

When you procrastinate, on the other hand, you avoid your story and do not move forward with writing it. You even wish it would go away. After a period of procrastination, you feel that you have wasted your time. After a period of lingering, however, you feel like you have made some headway in fleshing out your story.

Since we are looking for a better use of our time, it behooves us not to put off scrutinizing this time waster. (Ha! Ha! I couldn’t resist that little note of hilarity!)

Procrastination in the writer produces a serious lack of text. This is a huge negative if you want to finish your memoir and get it out in the world while you can still enjoy it. (Yes, I’ve had procrastinating clients die on me without finishing their memoirs. Not a good choice to put off finishing a story before it’s too late.)

Writing for quantity is a prelude to writing for quality. When you procrastinate writing, you cannot produce text in quantity. No quantity now equals nothing to edit for quality later.

There are three types of procrastination.

One sort of procrastination seems benign enough as it contributes—seemingly—to the development of the memoir. You put off writing to buy supplies, or do more research.

Another sort of procrastination is more shamelessly avoidant. 
You are hungry, so you make a snack or justify going outside because the weather is nice.

The last type of procrastination is deadly.  Having doubts about your writing skills and allowing those doubts to prevent you from writing can cause you to procrastinate.

You can overcome the three types of procrastination with the antidotes listed in Writer’s Time: Management That Works.  Overcome this time waster and commit to writing your memoir. You will soon complete your memoir and look back and wonder why you put it off.

Action steps you can take to identify and overcome procrastination:

• What have you procrastinated about writing in the last while?
• As best you can, note what you were writing at the time you procrastinated.
• How did you feel about your skill level, the subject matter, and the level of emotional difficulty?