Procrastination, Part XXXVI

Or listening to me make excuses for not writing

Spending time napping and taking selfies instead of writing.

This is a self-indulgent whiny post of the variety I’d normally save for my personal journal. I’m honestly not sure what good sharing it will do, but maybe you’ll relate and that’ll make your day a little better, or maybe someone will read this and send me a magic potion to make me stop putting things off. Here’s what’s on my mind:

I don’t even know what to write, just that I am itching to write, that there’s something inside of me that wants out onto the page. But I don’t know what it is. This has never happened before (to me).

I have a million ideas in my head for fiction and nonfiction but somehow none of them seem to be what I need to work on right now. This is my curse. I am great at beginning a story or an essay…and then beginning another one. My computer is so full of beginnings, of characters twisting in the wind, dawdling around, waiting to see where I’ll send them next. Many of them have grown impatient and have lay down to take long, long fairy-tale like naps. It would take the right concoction to wake them up again.

Just now, one of our cats is meowing, needing…something. I’m not sure he even knows what — just like my stories, needing something to happen next.

I need something to happen next. But I am aware, as is always the case when I feel this way, I have to make it happen. Whatever it is. I can sit here and hope to be saved from my boredom by some sort of deus ex machina, but that has never worked. My life is not a poorly-written thriller. Those so-called acts of god, or random machinations of the universe, only show up at times and in ways that are inconvenient in real life.

I’ve got a pack of horror stories in progress that are proving more difficult to write (or at least to write well) than I had hoped and thought. I have a first-person-perspective story about a woman in her late forties who finds herself suddenly alone for the first time in two decades. I have a series of personal essays about all of the boys I dated over the years and what I learned from all of that. Those are just the ones that really have a leg to stand on. There are at least a dozen more fitful starts that are less than two pages. Plus the many, many drafts of newsletters not sent here on Substack.

The cat is still meowing. Now he’s staring at his sister like he wants her to play with him. I could use someone to play with me.

My New Year’s resolution was to start a writer’s group. It is April and I have gotten as far as mentioning it to a couple of people. It makes sense that I write stories full of people’s internal mental gymnastics instead of action. It’s a reflection of my own life. As they say, all stories are autobiographical.

Side Note: That’s not to say that anything that happened in my last novel happened to me. People are always asking me that. The characters possess traits informed by my experiences, but truly, they and the events are fiction. (Though I am flattered that people think it’s believable enough to have actually occurred.)

But I definitely need to start a writer’s group. Hanging with other writer types does wonders for my motivation.

And then there are all the interruptions. I do use them as excuses for procrastination, but just because I’m using them doesn’t mean they don’t truly exist. It’s hard to get a writing groove going when your days are punctuated with a day job, kids’ activities, mundane shit like housework and doctors appointments and a cat that is now on top of the refrigerator whose meows are only growing more mournfully insistent.

There are competing priorities. I could hole myself up in my office on nights and weekends and write. But then I would miss the moments with my kids who, as teenagers, are rapidly racing toward adulthood and independence. This is both true in my heart and an excuse not to do the hard stuff of continuing writing what I have started.

The thing is, I seem to need a LOT of time to get to writing, but not just to do the actual putting of words onto paper. I need time to go on hikes and to think and then to come back and write. To stare at the ceiling for long moments and then hop up and put what’s in my head into the keyboard. But it is time for dinner, and so I cook instead.

And I am lazy about writing on weekends the same way I am lazy about formal exercise on weekends. The five-day workweek is so ingrained in my being, I find myself incapable of doing anything beyond absolute obligation and whatever strikes me in the moment. Saturday and Sunday are days to indulge in impulsivity (when we’re not driving to soccer games.)

I know it’s time. Time to get back to writing, time to admit to myself that some of the projects I feel I should work on, it just isn’t the time for. Time to shit or get off the pot. Time to pick one thing and commit. I’ve done it before; that’s how I finally finished a book. The process was not always smooth or pretty or easy, and many times I wrote or edited when I would rather do a lot of other things to avoid it.

But the damned cat is in my office meowing now, so I guess I better go see what the hell he needs.