Are You Processing or Procrastinating?

How Does a Writer Know if they are Processing or Procrastinating?

Well, pretty much they don’t.

Wait! Stop! Don’t leave! Let’s roll around in this and see if there’s anything worth taking away from the question.

Pay by the word, or word count (which I claim to have renounced) as a milestone is one way for a writer to figure out if they’re really actually writing enough or not.

When you’re paid by the word and writing is your job, you have capitalism telling you what to focus on. And Capitalism is loud. Maybe you get a dollar a word writing advertorial content, an hourly rate or salaried rate as a tech writer, or you make one to ten cents a word writing fiction and you do all three.

Check to see if you are still living indoors / have access to healthcare and adjust your focus accordingly. (Don’t go by if you’re starving because it’s hard to starve in the west.)

But what about aspiring writers? First of all there is no such thing—there are writers who aspire to be to be read more widely, or published but all writers who are actually writing are writers.

So what about those people?

Well.  How much and how fast do you have to be writing to be really writing.

Hemingway’s rate was around 500 words a day. That’s a novel or so of some length a year depending on how many days you spend dead drunk. Back in the olden times, that more or less meant you were a writer, but you wrote in longhand in mastodon blood or with a coal powered typewriter and the editing process was kinda excruciating and doing research was way hard. So that’s part of the old time slowness.

Stephen King supposedly writes 2k a day which is two big fat novels a year or one superfat one. Again, depending on weekends, vacations, and how much time you spend on social media yelling at the president.

A thousand is given as a kind of average number for Really Being A Writer but the million word a year pulp writer rate is 3000 plus words a day, on average, for 333.3 days or so. (Math!)

But this is complicated when Writers you Like and Respect say things like “I wrote that novel in four days,” or “I had the idea for this story during the Nixon administration and then wrote it off and on for fifty years while I worked as an editor for lug-nut monthly.”

Which brings us back to your process, your subconscious, and the universal human desire to slack off and pretend to do something rather than actually fucking do it. 

Your process may well require background work in the subconscious. Time to ruminate. Time to ponder. Time to stare into the sky and think about eating more than you should. Time for inadvisable, elaborately imagined fully-staged sexual yearnings. Time to worry about things you said at parties that you suspect you shouldn’t have. Time to worry if your social media presence is helping you, or if its millstone around your neck.

Um.

Time to process. 

Before you feel good about this thought, you should know that maybe all you need, really, is to sleep regularly and well.

I knew a writer who asked himself five open ended questions about his work in progress each night before he went to sleep and while he never had any answers in his dreams he noticed that after he had done this his work flowed more easily. So he still does it.

So while you may never know when a lull in output is refilling the tank, and when it is being worthless and weak, I have found you can almost always do one of the following.  Or rather, I can.

1. Write crappy first drafts.
2. Write to writing prompts and
3. Work on pure craft without worrying about content or
4. Edit stuff that you know you need to edit but the thought fills you with dread
5. Read something you know you should but haven’t had the energy to read. (Something higher up on the literary / intellectual food chain than your output.)
6. Be doing something super cool so outside your comfort zone that you’d rather be writing
   

if you think you are procrastinating, you definitely are. If you worry if you might be procrastinating but aren’t sure, do the list above. If you’re pretty sure you’re not procrastinating… try editing less and writing more first draft material until your ‘to be edited’ pile induces nausea. Because if a lull in output comes, you’ll have plenty of number four to do.

If my process ideas seem dumb to you, congratulations, because in the end, you have to do you, and make the process that works for you. This process will ideally be somewhere between:

• Smugly knowing that every minute you are not writing was really necessary. So the one book every ten years is awesome.
• Hating  yourself for every minute you are not spewing one thousand words an hour. Letting that hate make you quit.

As my wife said, moderation in all things, to which I replied, “wait–isn’t that too much moderation?”

She sighs.

“Can one be immoderately moderate?”

“I have to go work now.”

Picture my wife pondering her unpaid emotional labor before leaving for her mile long walk to work.

Picture me bleary eyed staring at my giant imac on my improvised standing desk. That means our dresser. Writing new words or doing 1-4. Trying to avoid the unpleasant extremes I mention.

I’m fifty six with a dozen or so professionally published short stories. 

I can sleep when I’m dead. No. I really should sleep regularly and well. 

But I have to stop procrastinating.