“To say that Abraham Lincoln was a writer is to say that he was a procrastinator. How many deadlines have I nearly blown over the years, slumped like Lincoln, fretting over words that didn’t come out until almost too late” – from “What He Said There” by Sarah Vowell.
“I say that Albert Vetch was the first real writer I knew not because he was, for a while, able to sell his work to magazines, but because he was the first one to have the midnight disease; to have the rocking chair and the faithful bottle of bourbon and the staring eye, lucid with insomnia even in the daytime”. – from Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon.
I’ll get back to the quotes in just a second. First, I’d like to be all narcissistic (this is a blog after all) and talk about my own experience with procrastination in general and its relationship with writing in particular.
For me, procrastination is the worst kind of accomplice, like a persuasive and drunk back seat drive (that joke comes courtesy of Demetri Martin) . It whispers to me, when I should be working on a school essay or in one of those bi-monthly periods I say, I’m going to write let’s say a thousand words a day, and it tells me “Yeah, that sounds great, but you’ve only watched Love and Death twice this week, wouldn’t that be a better use of time.” And of course he’s wrong, but it’s such a good idea. I mean, it’s not like I’ve memorized the opening lines yet like with Annie Hall. So, I take a two hour break. Which, of course, becomes an afternoon break, then an evening break, then a two week break, and suddenly its nine o’clock the night the paper or the report is due and I’m frantically typing, not bothering to edit, because at least I get a rough draft period in High School.
Meanwhile, procrastination has vamoosed, maybe on the lamb in the occipital lobe, or the cerebellum, or maybe even Canada for all I know. All that matters is the slippery guy has gone and left me with a 4-6 page paper to finish on a book about as dry as one of Daria’s quips.
But I find that if I have something, a line or a scene in my head and it just won’t shake itself loose until I write it down, procrastination is just as absent as when I’m about to miss a deadline.
Now, back to those quotes. As I said back in “My Personal Monster”(although I’m not sure if I can say back, like that, if you can just scroll down three inches and read it), most of the time when writers write about writing, it is about their procrastination in writing. The only exceptions I can think of are Strunk and White, Stephen King, and all those academic writers who are forced to. Sarah Vowell is perhaps the only person I’ve ever heard refer to Abraham Lincoln as a writer, and in an earlier part of that essay that although she’s always admired his writing, the first time she thought of him as a writer is when she saw the room where he spent most of the night before preparing the Gettysburg Address, writing and rewriting it.
For me its telling that she says to say he “was a writer is to say that he was a procrastinator”. It is one of the few things I find that I can relate to in most writers, that and writer’s block, two creatures that seem oddly connected. Most of my favorite writers seem to have had problems with one or the other of those, and it seems to knit the fairly rag-tag community of writers together. Indeed, if I were to write my own diagnosis of the midnight disease, I’d probably add procrastination to the list of symptoms. Or maybe, it’s separate, the one writers suffer from when the words just don’t come, and the midnight rocking and drinking becomes a distraction from the process, or when the endless and useless information of the internet sings its siren song to you.
After all, the best device of procrastination that I’ve found is Netflix, for its sheer quantity of time wasting material. I have to shut off my airport if I actually want to get any work done. And it’s always such a great temptation. After all, I’ve only seen Manhattan Murder Mystery…and it is related to Annie Hall…
Oh, god.
I need help.
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