I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like I spend more of my life thinking about my writing than actually doing it. That's not to say that I don't produce when I do sit down. Once I get going it's like someone unplugged a dam in my brain and everything just flows out onto the screen. And it's so fast that my brain can barely keep up.
The thing with me is, well, I'm a procrastinator.
Probably the worst combo for me is lots of time + easy projects on my plate. That means my brain decides to stay in "thinking" mode until it is coaxed out by default due to an impending deadline or a pesky bill that's due. Or sometimes it decides to engage because I'm bored and need to do something, or because I want to feel productive on that particular day.
Maybe it's a defense mechanism, that whole fear of failure thing. So maybe what I'm really doing is putting off possible failure until the last possible moment, and this moment can stall and stall and stall when nothing is pressing me to address it.
But either way, I recognize that I spend probably 70% of my time thinking about my writing and 30% of my time actually doing it. And to be honest, I really like it that way. Because that means I get to have a life outside of my writing. And it also means that when I do sit down to write, I'm very productive. I feel prolific, to be honest, because it comes out so easily and so quickly.
That's not to say that I don't have to edit. I absolutely do, and it takes a lot of time. So lest anyone think that I sit back eating bonbons and just shoot off some quick and dirty copy to my clients, let me reassure you that I do have a standard writing process that includes letting my material sit, doing rewrites, and doing several rounds of editing. It's just spread out in between little explosions.
I spent several hours procrastinating before I sat down to write this blog. It's been maybe 8 minutes since I started writing it, and now I'll go back and rewrite, and edit, and edit again until my eyeballs want to pop out of their sockets. And then I'll go on with my day, procrastinating until the little explosion in my brain moves me to work on my next project.
Being a writer is fun. I love it. Don't you?
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