Recently, I read an interesting article that a friend had recommended in
The Atlantic Monthly. It was by Megan
McArdle and was called “Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators”. McArdle began her article by saying, “Like most writers, I am an
inveterate procrastinator. In the course of writing this one article, I have
checked my e-mail approximately 3,000 times, made and discarded multiple
grocery lists, conducted a lengthy Twitter battle over whether the gold
standard is actually the worst economic policy ever proposed, written Facebook
messages to schoolmates I haven’t seen in at least a decade, invented a
delicious new recipe for chocolate berry protein smoothies, and googled my own
name several times to make sure that I have at least once written something
that someone would actually want to read.”
Except for her bent for shopping lists and inventing gourmet desserts (I
just grab a scone or a piece of the vanilla pound cake my wife has kindly bought
at the grocery), I couldn’t have identified more. McArdle goes on to say that
she has, over the years, “developed a theory about why writers are such
procrastinators: We were too good in English class.” She then adds, as a kind
of caveat, “This sounds crazy, but hear me out.”
And her explanation makes sense. She holds that while English was one of
the hardest classes for a lot of the other more “left-brained” kids, writerly
types like us who spent hours reading literature because we liked to, were fond of how words went
together, couldn’t resist a good story and didn’t mind getting down and dirty
with sentence diagramming, were always ahead of the game in that department and
could easily ace it.
 |
He looked at me as if observing something uncommon but
not exceptional--say, an albino dung beetle...
|
This may have been truer in my case than in most since I couldn’t have
been more “right-brained”. I recall after graduating high school driving down
to Columbus to take the entry exams for the Ohio State University. After the grueling
hours of examination and orientation, I was called off to the side by one of
the scholarly-looking gents who was acting as a monitor and grader for the
tests. He’d evidently had his eye out to discover who I was when the test
results were put up. I must have
fractured some test curve because he asked my name, looked at me as if he were
observing something uncommon but not exceptional—say, an albino dung beetle—and
asked (rhetorically, as it turned out), “Do you realize that you are in the
upper ninety-eight percentile in the United States in Language...” I beamed but
he held up a staying hand, “...the upper ninety-five percentile in social sciences...” I continued to smile and
blush, “the upper ninety percentile in history and current affairs...” at this
point I was shuffling and somewhat nervously awaiting the punch line, “and the lower ten percentile in exact
sciences?” (He clearly said this last with a question mark but it deserved a
whole slew of exclamation points behind it as well). Then he said, with the
cautious restraint and tense grimace of someone opening the lid of a box in
which he or she might expect to find a time-bomb, “Tell me, what do you plan to
study in college...” again he held up his hand to stop me from answering too
quickly, “and please...please!...don’t
tell me architecture or engineering?”
When I said my plan was to study music and literature, he almost swooned
with relief, shook hands with me and said, “Good luck then, son!”
But back to Ms. McArdle’s theory: She says that after acing English
throughout our school days without its ever being particularly hard for us, we
suddenly find ourselves out in the world competing with all the other language nerds
who are now professional writers. And suddenly, inevitably, we’re scared to
death that we might not be up to the challenge. We are no longer even albino
dung beetles, but part of an international guild with a top, a middle and a
bottom. More than writer’s block, what attacks us when we sit down before the
blank page or screen is the question of whether we’ll be up to the challenge of
writing something worthy. The fear, in other words, is that what we’ll
write might simply not be very good. And that thought is a veritable nightmare.
So, says McArdle, we stall...and stall...and stall...until the last minute,
until we’re hot on a deadline and the fear of writing nothing at all overcomes the fear of writing something not so hot.
In some of the most commercially effective writers, this constant fear
of failure to create the perfect story manifests itself merely as a mildly
neurotic nature. In others, like, say, Hemingway or Bukowski, it seems to lead
to hard work with brilliant results juxtaposed with unbridled alcoholism and
self-destructive behavior. In still others, gentle, private souls like, say,
the great Harper Lee, it spells a single brilliant coming-of-age novel and then
a lifetime of silence.
I think one of the first five-syllable words I ever learned was
“pro-cras-ti-na-tion”. The thing is, it was written on many of my grade-school report
cards—in the space reserved for teachers’ comments—pretty much from first grade
on. Sometimes it was accompanied by other descriptive qualifiers such as lazy,
indolent, day-dreamer, excuse-maker, inattentive, under-achiever, etc. Teachers
were often mildly or sometimes even very actively and vocally irritated with me
for this. I wish I had a dollar for every time one of them told my mother, “Dan
is so intelligent, but also so very lazy. It’s a shame! He doesn’t even try!” If he did, he’d be brilliant!”
 |
| One teacher disagreed. She figured I was just a dunce. |
There was one teacher who disagreed. She figured I was just a dunce. She
told me as much once. I had her for a teacher two years in grade school—with
one year off for good behavior in between. At the start of the second year, I
wanted to make a commitment from the outset. I went to her on the first day and
said, “Mrs. X, I just want you to know that you won’t have any trouble with me
this year. I plan to buckle down and not get behind. In fact, I plan to get
straight-A’s.”
She laughed a bitter, cynical laugh and said, “Well, you might as well
not even bother trying for that, Dan. You’ll never be a straight-A student. It’s not in you to be one. Some
pupils are no better than average. You aren’t cut out to be top of your class.
Besides, you’re left-handed and lefties are at a disadvantage from the outset.
They’re under-achievers and usually just not
as smart as right-handed people.
A few years later when my interest in art, music, writing and the
biographies of famous people became more acute, I wanted to go back to her and
ask—politely, mind you—if she’d been dropped on her head during
teacher-training, since, obsessed as I was about being a southpaw after that
(and even before because teachers were always clucking their tongues over my
“messy handwriting”), I was always interested to know which hand the famous
people I read about favored. Artists Michelangelo,
Da Vinci and Raphael, famed humanist and missionary Dr. Albert Schweitzer, award-winning
radio and television journalist Edward R. Murrow (although in the fashion of
the time he had been broken of writing with his left hand), writers H.G. Wells,
Franz Kafka and Eudora Welty, as well as a multitude of other renowned
over-achievers...all left-handed.
However, about my tendency to put off until tomorrow...and
tomorrow...and tomorrow...what I should be doing today, she and other
frustrated educators through whose hands I passed during those twelve years of
grade school, junior high and high school had a definite point. But it wouldn’t
surprise any of them to hear that I have an excuse for that too. For the first
five of those years I was handicapped by poor eyesight, which, oddly enough,
nobody seemed to notice—least of all myself because I’d never known any other
way of seeing and thought everybody saw that way. That would tend to explain
what teachers referred to as my “inattentiveness”. Any normally sighted person
who has reached forty or forty-five and suddenly felt increasing disinterest in
reading the newspaper or looking up telephone numbers or reading a book instead
of watching something they’ve seen a hundred times already on TV, only to
discover that they need reading glasses because, as part of the aging process,
they are becoming far-sighted will understand what I’m talking about. The
tendency isn’t to say, “Boy! I’ve simply got to go get some specs because I
can’t see for crap!” It is, instead, to “lose interest” in anything that you
need perfect vision for, to put off whatever it is for as long as you can, or
to duck it completely until it finally becomes impossible to ignore the problem
any longer.
That’s what happened to me in the first five years of grade school,
while I unwittingly struggled with my impaired eyesight. I had a great deal of
trouble seeing what the teacher wrote on the blackboard. It was like
hieroglyphics to me, even when I sat up front. And that never lasted long
because I would get bored to death from the strain of trying to see the teacher’s
hen-scratchings on the slate at the front of the room and would start
whispering or passing notes to my neighbors and distracting them as well, until
I was ultimately asked to sit at the back of the class for the rest of the
year. From that vantage point, the effort of making out what the teacher was
writing on the board was rendered futile, which meant that while I was still
trying to figure out what the words on the board said, the teacher was erasing
them and moving on to the next point.
In all that time, however, I never lost my avid interest in reading.
Left to my own devices, I could take as long as I wished to read a book and
could adjust the distance at which I read it so as to accommodate my sight as
best I could often closing one eye to compensate for a double astigmatism. And
also left to my own devices, it got so that I read what I wanted to read more
than what was assigned, or even in addition to what was assigned, but without
sticking to any lesson plan whatsoever.
It was the summer after fifth grade that my vision problem was finally
diagnosed. That summer—the last one in which I didn’t have a job of one kind or
another—I spent either hanging out at the public swimming pool or reading
books. I read in the morning, spent the afternoon at the pool then read some
more. And since it was summer and there was no school to worry about, I would
also stay up late at night reading as well. By mid-summer I had developed a
condition known as “granulated eyelids”—a series of tiny blisters on the
underside of the lid that makes it feel as if a pinch of coarse sand has been
tossed into each eye with every blink.
My mother figured it was from the chlorine in the pool water (no
red-blooded American boy back then would have been caught dead wearing goggles
in the pool) but when, for the first time in my life, she took me to the eye
doctor, he declared the cause to be severe eye-strain, said my vision was
clearly impaired, and immediately prescribed corrective lenses. And when I went
back for the fitting some days later, the doctor said, “You need to wear these
all the time, okay, not just for reading.”
Glasses opened up a whole new world of visual perception for me and made
learning a much less exhausting process. But by then, my unusual study habits
were formed, and I’d been getting away with their results for years. I would
gallop through the textbooks on my own in the first part of the year, take
notes in class and listen carefully to what the teacher had to say and that was
enough to get a passing grade. That meant I seldom did any but written homework
and that I spent a lot more time on my own reading and writing than I did on
schoolwork. Since I’d been convinced from the outset that I was incapable of
straight-A’s, I never strived for them and lived perfectly well with B’s and
C’s, giving all of my real effort, instead, to learning to play music and write
stories.
When I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, while still in my twenties, I
decided I was going to find a way to write for a living. After banging my head
against the wall for a while trying to land a job with one of the major
international agencies or publications, I ended up badgering the managing
editor of the local English-language newspaper (which was already building a
worldwide name for itself as a paladin of human rights) until he finally,
reluctantly, gave me a thirty-day trial. I ended up working for the daily for
the next 13 years and eventually became its managing editor, before deciding to
go free lance. Let me just state, for the record, that nowhere can a writer
learn more about getting busy and getting done with things than in a daily
newspaper.
When I first started there, however, I found myself going through all of
my "writerly" procrastination processes, because I knew no other way
to work. The editor, a procrastinator himself, knew precisely what was going on
and said, "For chrissake, Dan! You have got to come right in and get
down to it! Just dig in and get it
done! We've got about six or seven hours a night to write a paper. There's no time for messing about!"
So I learned to work fast, really fast, sometimes as much as three
thousand or three thousand five hundred words a night between writing and
translation (and still found time to
procrastinate a little). The night desk editor had a rule of his own, a sort of
news quality rule of thumb, which posited that “what is utterly unacceptable at
6 p.m. may be deemed sublime at 11:30.”
But some years later, when I moved up and became an editorial writer and
columnist, I learned to handle my editorial executive duties early on in the
afternoon and evening, and leave the writing for later. Soon, I was right back
to my same old writer's game, while, of course, jumping all over the younger
writers for not getting the lead out. In this position, I was no longer
expected to put out such a heavy load of wordage and in the meantime, I had
learned to put word to page with lightning speed. One well-written piece a
night was all anyone could expect of a good writer. But real writing time was,
perhaps, two hours. The rest was spent reading up, drinking coffee, talking to
colleagues about unrelated topics, going out for a quick drink and a quick
sandwich with a friend, coming back and catching up on correspondence, and
finally, under the gun like nobody's business, knocking out what I'd been
writing in my head all day and all night and editing it to fit the hole that
had been left for me to fill.
Still, clear through my middle years, I felt guilty about
procrastination. It was my dirty little secret, sort of like being a secret
morphine addict or wearing lifts to look taller might be for somebody else. I
thought it diminished me as a person and a writer, that it made me damaged
goods somehow. In very recent years, however (almost too late for it
to make any real difference), I've come to terms with procrastination and
accepted it as part of an inevitable process. It’s the first time I’ve said
that out loud and in public, mainly because it sounds so vain and lame and
"artistic" that it makes me want to puke (which as some of us know is
also sometimes part of the writing process) that I really never wanted to own
up to the fact that there even was a
process. But there is...and for most writers, systematically “wasting” time
seems to be a big part of it.
While I tend to agree that the fear of writing nothing at all has to
surpass the fear of writing something horrible before many of us can write
(another reason writers ask for criticism but are then crushed when it's not
what they wanted to hear), I don't believe that this means good writers will
always write something less worthy by procrastinating until a few scant hours
before the deadline. On the contrary, I think that if many of us didn't play
the waiting game and dashed something off as soon as it was assigned, it might
very well...er...suck. For while we're fretting, writing unnecessary and
inconsequential posts about Atlantic
Monthly articles, complaining about not being understood and crying about
how much more recognition we should have had than we've been given, we are
also—even if subconsciously—running phrases over in our heads, finding a stance
on our subject, flirting with research sources, finding a point of view and
voice for what we're about to write, and convincing ourselves that we might
actually be something like qualified to write on the subject assigned (despite
our constant self-doubt) and it's only once we've done all this that we are
anywhere near ready to put word to page or screen.
The trick, then, is to turn procrastination from a fault into a craft.
And I plan to get started on that first thing tomorrow...or the next day...
