No Magic in Procrastination

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” Joan Didion

I am not twenty eight and I’m not Joan Didion, but yes, I evade and procrastinate. I am the master. Apparently this can happen when you start the serious writing course (TSWC); when you have but a few short months to produce a manuscript; when the course you have thought about for two years hasn’t unleashed the creative monster as you’d expected. The beast continues to enjoy an extended hibernation deep within your soul. It crawls out every now and then, takes a look around, but decides not to gallop down your arms the way it did for Salley Vickers when she sat down to write Miss Garnet’s Angel. I sat not five metres from the elegant and erudite Ms Vickers a few years ago when she demonstrated what happened when her beast stirred. It stretched, opened its eyes to Vickers's creative possibilities and took off. It scampered down her writing arm, burrowed through her pen hand and emerged onto the pages. Lordie, it was literary magic, the thing that happened to Ms Vickers when she penned Miss Garnet’s Angel.

To survive the writing process, you must cast aside stories about literary magic. You must put those fairy tales into a box and slam down the lid. But why, I often wonder, does the writerly world seem full of success stories in human form who just sit down and write; novelists who speak of writing the way new mothers with a short term memory problem speak about the wonder of childbirth. There’s an unspoken code of ethics that demands authors arrive at festivals with a book under their arm and a smile plastered across their face. Somehow in the publishing process, writers forget the hell. Once their book materializes, smelling new and looking pretty, the author joins the ranks of those who consistently fail to mention the pain, agony, blank pages, foul moods, resentment and loss of confidence that befalls the wannabe writer.

It’s called marketing and it’s all about airbrushing.

At least the serious writing course (TSWC) has addressed this matter satisfactorily. Yes, writing is indeed an illness, and the good news is that like a curable illness, a rosy afterglow moves in where pain once lived. The fact is that writing a book is far from a magical process. Certainly there are writers like the famous crime writer who has never been to a writing class and has produced multiple books all on his own without help from anyone, except perhaps a loyal spouse who manages everything else in his life, leaving him free to write.

“I want a wife,” we partakers of TSWC have been heard to say as we nibble iced Vo Vos and sip peppermint tea. Some of us want to stab that crime writer with a fork.

Perhaps it is possible to arrive in this grown up, sentient life with enough self-belief imprinted on your DNA to just sit down and write. But as I sit doodling in a sun-drenched room one wintry Saturday morning listening to his journey from journalism to crime writing, I learn that in the crime writer's case, his famous crime novels followed a period where he ghost wrote no fewer than fifteen books. Yes, writers born with the skills and dedication to create literary masterpieces without help are indeed rare.Behind every writer is an inevitably painful, invisible-to-others journey. Perhaps the problem is poor memory. Or let's face it, maybe it's just marketing.

But back to procrastination. Unfortunately the TSWC hasn't yet taught me how to deal with it. In my house, the problem manifests in an appalling tendency to produce bucket loads of homemade tomato sauce or declutter the refrigerator of compostable foodstuffs when I know I should be at the desk, punching out a minimum 1000 words a day.

Last week I even braved the storms to repot the petunias and the winter bulbs and plant fresh crops of basil and parsley. After that I made pesto sauce.

What is wrong with me?

“It’s not procrastination, Jules,” says my friend Jess.

A beautiful bi-product of TSWC is friendship. Two afflicted souls disappeared for a weekend a while back. We went on a writer’s retreat, to a shabby-chic cottage by a purple raging sea. There she was, not long after we retreated to our rooms to write, She was out of her den. She prowled the house like a lion on the lookout for warthog. Her large brown eyes seemed even bigger than usual and wider too, as though they had shifted outwards towards her ears. Her delicate skin was chalk pale and her hair was swept into a disturbing up do that looked a bit like a magpie’s nest.

“Jules, it’s the fear,” said Jess as she marched to the fridge and shovelled 70% dark chocolate and raw almonds into her mouth. 

Jess thinks we should set fire to anyone who says writing is easy.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you sign up to TSWC, you must forget magical literary stories, fables about books writing themselves. You must turn up to work and put words on the page. Jess is dead right. It is bloody scary, this writing illness. Thankfully no one in TSWC has said it’s easy, managing the pain. There’s absolutely no magic in it, just an occasional warm feeling when you get some words down. And when you kill some words off. We are learning about that, too: killing your darlings works (and I don't mean youe loved ones).

So why do we do it? That’s the easy and the worrying bit. We do it because we love it.