
Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators - agarden
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-writers-are-the-worst-procrastinators/283773/?single_page=true
======
kdamken
Don't worry about what this article talks about. If you're a writer, or an
artist, or a musician, etc and are having trouble getting things done, the
solution is as simple as this:

Set a time slot everyday where you will sit down and do nothing but work on
creating your art. Doesn't matter if it's good or bad, your only job is to sit
there and create for the whole time period. That's the key, is consistently
trying to do it.

I highly recommend reading the The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, he goes
into this a lot more - [https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-
Battles/dp/1...](https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-
Battles/dp/1936891026/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)

He also talks about the concept of "Resistance", which is basically a force of
nature that's works against you getting things done, and that gets stronger
the closer you are towards doing work that is meaningful to you.

~~~
salemh
I'm an amateur writer / hobbyist. Having had a decade+ practice of this back-
and-forth procrastination with my writing, I'd add "blank page" to War of Art
and your excellent comment.

"Blank Page" refers to having a separate notebook, or open document page on
your computer, that you write why you don't want to write, during your time
period.

If I don't want to write, I write that: "I don't feel like writing today. It's
not going to mean anything, or I'm bored with the story. Today wasn't that
good of a day.." etc. Eventually, it dumps the things distracting you, and
after five minutes I'm typically back into writing my actual work.

Creative endeavors/procrastination has always been interesting to me, as I
haven't had an issue dumping 90-120 hours into different employers, but have
the issue with my own writing.

This is also a tool used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in various forms of
use, namely, sleep. If you can't sleep at night, sometimes you need to dump
everything in your brain on paper (which many times turns into a huge to-do
list).

~~~
rpazyaquian
An important thing to note: I wouldn't call this a fool-proof way of getting
creative, necessarily. I tried this just now, and writing down my concerns and
"stoppages" actually brought up some pretty good points as to why _not_ to
bother.

I tried this for gamedev, just for some background. I've been putting off
starting some sort of one-off game in Unity even though people scream at me
"just make something!!". I thought about why I was hesitating to do so, and
wrote down a Blank Page. Here's a few notable things I came up with:

\---

> It's too hard on my own.

Games are multimedia projects. They incorporate audio, video, input,
networking, etc. Game development teams are composed of experts in each of the
fields the game touches. It's like making a movie, and making an entire movie
on your own is somewhere between extremely difficult and laughably impossible.

> It involves a lot of planning.

In order to make games the "right" way, you need to design the right way from
the very beginning. There's a lot of prep work ("preproduction") that involve
determining gameplay systems, art and sound direction, and a whole bunch of
other things in advance.

> It's not something I already know how to do.

True, nobody is born knowing how to make a game. But that just means you need
to gain the skills in order to do so, which involves _learning_ said skills,
which involves time and effort. Therefore...

> It's a big time investment.

Making a game is in fact a significant time investment. Even if you're
offloading graphics and netcode work to someone or something else, you still
have to write gameplay code, playtest, debug, redesign, and iterate. Games can
and often do take on the order of years to develop. And even outside of
developing the actual game itself, the skills needed to even _start_ (e.g.
programming, game design, art, etc.) are things that people spend their entire
lives mastering.

> I won't really be able to make something worthwhile.

Even if you do spend your free time putting your game together to the point
where you're happy with its polish and development, it can still ultimately be
an uninteresting failure - in which case, all that time and effort is arguably
time not well spent. That's a huge blow, especially in a day and age where
free time is at a premium. This makes trying to make a game a much less
appealing prospect. And even if someone _can_ make something worthwhile, it'd
be after a few games that aren't as great anyway, so that time and effort
spent multiplies.

\---

Writing this down actually helped me put my concerns into words: games are
_not_ single-person endeavors, even for relatively simple ones. Books can be
written by a single person since they only touch upon a very specific subject
and field that's reasonable for a single person to handle, but games are a
very different beast that tie together many different disciplines. To put it
in software development terms, books are comparable to web apps and command-
line utilities, while games are more comparable to operating systems and
enterprise software.

That's not to say the Blank Page exercise isn't worth it, not at all - it's
very helpful for organizing your thoughts and for self-reflection, and you can
see how it helped me. But sometimes, if you procrastinate so much over doing
something, the reality is that you might just not want to do it in the first
place.

~~~
westoncb
Here are some counter-arguments, for anyone who might be considering the
dilemma:

> It's too hard on my own.

It can be, but it really does depend on the scale of what you're making:
there's a large class of games that aren't too difficult for individuals, and
a large class that are; and, in the class of approachable games, there are
still fun, interesting, novel projects that can be undertaken.

> It involves a lot of planning.

This is one thing you'll learn to find a balance with by writing games. There
is too much and too little planning. Don't worry too much about making them
the 'right' way to begin with. In my own case I intentionally didn't look up
any info. on the correct way of making games until I'd tried my own way first
(which is much more fun and worked out fine). After doing that, looking up
established practices was way more interesting (and my own approaches were
laughably bad in comparison—but ya learn!).

> It's a big time investment.

Some are, some aren't. As others have mentioned, you can make a quick game in
two days or so. More importantly though, I'd say to try it out and see if you
enjoy the process: if you don't, then the time investment probably will be too
much, and you could end up spoiling your love for games in general. If you do
enjoy it then, whatever the final outcome of the game, it was time well spent.

> I won't really be able to make something worthwhile.

You may get ambitious about it one day after you've developed your skills to a
certain extent, and find yourself with a greater interest in sharing an
experience through your game than in working on it. If you get to that point,
you're now in the realm of working on art, and that's got its own whole host
of difficulties.

~~~
mjevans
Scale is important.

You should scale your expectations down, come up with the most simple, minimum
viable product. If you still don't feel the scale is small enough, try to
break off a chunk of that MVP you think you /can/ complete.

Then try.

You're probably going to make an initial version as you're learning, and your
design is either going to radically change as you learn more about the problem
you're actually trying to solve and the tools you're solving it with, or
you'll end up throwing it away and refactoring the entire thing when you do
have an understanding.

Then, when you've got something that works, you'll start tweaking it. Making X
better, or adding Y; or even removing Z because you realize it isn't something
that should be there.

That's the programming equivalent of the 50 pots thing. Each iteration you run
being like a small test-firing, and each deployment being like a pot you
actually feel like putting through use tests.

------
cableshaft
Someone needs to make a writing editor that disguises itself as forum threads,
because I can write paragraphs off the cuff in response to Reddit and Hacker
News no problem, but when I sit down to a blank editor I ...well it's hard to
even sit at the blank editor to begin with, but it takes a lot of effort to
get going.

If it weren't for Nanowrimo and being reminded consistently to participate in
a short story anthology every year, I'd be a writer who didn't write (except
comments on HN/Reddit).

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
I admit, this made me laugh.

Problem is that information snacks like news and forums are the intellectual
equivalent of vending machine junk food. We know it's better for us to cook
our own food but we get lazy. Same with forum posts. We feel like we're
actually doing something when we're not.

~~~
projektir
Can't really agree with you there.

There are comments that are superior to the article they're responding to.
There are books that are better off not being read at all. Forums also serve a
few purposes that raw reading material cannot.

I think moralizing the activity brings with it the peril that you may start
feeling good about consuming information the "right" way, and feel bad about
consuming it the "wrong" way, while what you should really care about is the
information itself. How you get it doesn't really matter.

Granted, I don't see anything particularly virtuous or advantageous about
cooking your own food, either, so perhaps we're at an impasse...

~~~
zeroer
Well, it's better to get your spouse to cook for you....

But baring that, restaurant food is generally too salty and fatty and light on
fresh vegetables to be healthy to rely on for most meals. There are
exceptions, but those restaurants tend to be drastically more expensive.

~~~
projektir
I seem to be able to find plenty of restaurant food that's not too light on
vegetables, and it's not significantly more expensive. Price is a factor, but
I think it's an overall factor: it's drastically more expensive to eat out
than at home.

But there are alternatives to cooking and going to restaurants that are often
frowned upon, yet nonetheless allow you to get everything you need and are
already drastically cheaper in many cases:

\- canned food;

\- frozen food;

\- meal replacements;

\- supplements.

------
wjoe
Hardly unique to writers, I've had much of the same issues with
procrastination when working on personal programming projects. Much as they
describe writer's fear of writing a bad novel, I give up when I think no one
will want to use the app I'm working on, I think the project be too difficult
to finish, or I'm worried about letting people see my badly written code.

Obviously there are some differences - there's a more specific barrier to
making software that is functional serves it's intended purpose, compared to a
story that might be badly written. But I think "I'm working on an app" may be
our generation's version of the "I'm writing a novel" cliche

------
jkot
In my experience most writers are paid by word, and write very fast. Most
content writers at Upwork seems to have very little procrastination..

In other terms, image as coder you are paid by number of lines you produce.
And there is no compiler, no unit tests...

~~~
frandroid
If the managers call it "content", it's yeoman's work, and you're not going to
get a lot of good writing in; the writers will phone it in.

Also, the longer the writing project, the more potential for procrastination.
1000 word articles are easier to wrap up than 10,000 features or books...

------
projektir
I'm getting a strong impression that the article wanted to talk about hard
work, growth mindset, and participation trophies, and not actually analyze why
writers put off writing.

I believe things like this can only be properly understood through empathy,
and all the talk about millennials and hard work and procrastination, being
blame behavior, is already putting one in the wrong mindset.

Perhaps the author should try writing some heavy books, herself.

------
leot
One simple explanation is that procrastination starts as a symptom of breadth-
first search behavior (which can look like slow progress, and is slow progress
if you have a poor algorithm/memory), and then it gets significantly
aggravated by a shame/guilt feedback loop.

------
CM30
The point about being too worried about writing something that isn't good is
likely why I write about half of what I should be writing. Because every time
I consider it done, I go back through the article, reword the intro, change a
bunch of sentences that don't sound right this time around and still keep
thinking "no, this is nowhere near as good as it could be".

I don't believe talent is innate or anything like that (which seems to be the
main assumption in the article, that people who procrastinate believed skill
is fixed). I believe full well anyone can become a better writer.

It's just my ambition is probably higher than my actual skill level, and I
simply can't accept anything I don't see as 'perfect'. So I get stressed, take
a break to do something else, get stressed even more and only get the
determination to finish on some random day when I feel like finishing
everything.

On another note, I wonder how much worse this 'imposter syndrome' and
'perfectionism' has become with the move to CMS systems like WordPress?

Because if you install certain plugins for those scripts (like Yoast), it
grades everything you write according to a Flesch–Kincaid readability test. As
a result, I find it's very easy to get distracted and worried by the giant
warning saying 'improvement required' and end up focusing more on that than
what you're actually supposed to be writing about.

Makes me wonder how many writers have been left paralysed with the fear their
work isn't 'good enough' simply because of the script they use to write their
work in...

------
cJ0th
My thesis is that procrastination comes from cognitive dissonances. And that's
the reason, why I don't understand these articles. They make a "science" out
of something rather simple. The reason I (as a hobbyist) "can't" write a book
or finish a piece of music is that I have ridiculously high, idealistic
standards when it comes to producing a work of art. I much rather produce
nothing than something mediocre. I don't even feel bad about it. I embrace
fatalism in this area. If I don't produce anything worthwhile, so be it. I
can't help it but start one musical project after the other. On rare occasions
I've got the feeling I am onto something. In that case finishing is no
problem. It could turn out that nobody likes what I do but in that case it
doesn't matter because I absolutely feel that I did the right thing.

On the other hand, there are professionals: people who create for a living. (I
am not talking about extraordinary people like J.K Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien
but people who _have_ to work every day just to fulfill a need of the market)
If you decide to go this route then idealistic thinking is (mostly) out of the
question. If I had to write a pop song or light fiction I'd just do it. All
that is required is knowing the basics of your craft and top down planning and
then you just work through the list like a maniac. It may be hard work but
it's easy to do because there are no contradictions. It's like knowing that
you have to walk 10k to get back home. That may be inconvenient but you
quickly realize that you have to do it and then you simply do it.

~~~
lifeformed
Nobody starts out creating things that meet their idealistic standards. The
only people that create such wonderful things are the people that trudged
through that period where they knew they were making crap, but kept going.

------
JustSomeNobody
I _want_ to write, but what stops me is:

1) I may not like what I write even though I _know_ I won't be any good at the
start (or ever).

2) Although I know the style I want to write in and read that style a lot, I
can't think of a good plot and so I convince myself that I need to do this
before even beginning to write. If that makes _any_ sense at all.

------
kiddz
Maybe those who write are fond of seeing themselves differently so they say
that writers are different.

~~~
veddox
Just about every group of people does that (including programmers). Belonging
to a group is one of the basic desires of every human, and one easy way to
create a feeling of belonging to one group is to differentiate its members
from everyone around.

------
pattisapu
Compare Robert Hanks, "On Putting Things Off"

[http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/robert-hanks/on-putting-
things-...](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/robert-hanks/on-putting-things-off)

------
icc97
Reminds me of this TED talk about 'Grit' by Angela Lee [1]

    
    
      [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance?language=en

------
waspleg
This is a great article thanks for posting it. My SO, in her not-day-job is a
writer and stand up comic.

She has set a self imposed 100 word minimum per day and has been going over 3
months now in an attempt to combat this type of procrastination.

It seems to not only be working for her but people who read about what she's
doing have also been motivated (but not me, and it's past my bed time ;)) to
work on their own projects whatever they may be.

------
JohaRiz
One of my favorite recent fantasy series is Kingkiller Chronicle, but its
author is notorious for procrastinating. It sucks because his books are so
beloved by the community, but he spends a ton of his time committing to other
projects like his podcast and video series, without ever providing any updates
on the status of his writing. It's like having a loved one missing and never
knowing their whereabouts.

------
emodendroket
Well, I feel like I could write the same thing except swap "writers" for a
different profession and then swap "English" for a different school subject.
Engineers are inveterate procrastinators because they easily did well in math.
Politicians, because they did great in social studies. And so on.

------
sambobeckingham
I think this article would have been a lot better had it had no content.

------
ctdonath
"I love deadlines. I love the swooshing sound they make as they go by." \-
Douglas Adams

------
searine
>Like most writers

Projecting much?

I am, and know tons of writers and few are procrastinators, so from the start
I find this idea goofy at best.

