Some Notes on Notes

Issue 156

Vico Equense, Italy 2016

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On Substack Notes, I posed the following question:

The question was flippant and casual and left out my own strident opinion, but, to my surprise, it generated numerous responses. Writers writing about writing is a subject that never quite tires those who aren’t writing—which isn’t intended to exclude me—and I found the responses enlightening, insightful, pragmatic, introspective, both expected and unexpected, amusing, and, in at least one case, utterly baffling.

There’s a rough consensus that writerly procrastination is a mask that conceals some hidden truth: the fear of a difficult subject, the fear of exposure, the fear of rejection, the fear of a mistake. And it doesn’t help that writers have a tendency to push introspection about these fears into obsessions—with a little introspection a helpful, yet potentially stultifying, aspect of craft. More than one commenter took exception with my dismissal of procrastination in other arts, though that wasn’t quite my point, as there’s no larger cultural story in the other arts—the procrastinating writer is a trope, the procrastinating musician is partying. But without stray points and misreadings and confusions, we wouldn’t call it social media.

Of course I can’t help but relish the paradox of asking about procrastination on a social app—with every new app on my phone, I sometimes believe, just the latest development in more advanced forms of procrastination. For all the discussions of chatbots and machine learning and artificial intelligence, I never hear about how technology will provide us with novel methods of avoiding work. The science of procrastination is also the one domain where writers are consistently at the vanguard, as no contemporary writer wants to waste time like previous generations—but only with accelerating productivity can we invent the future of procrastination.

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And social media has been one useful method of sloth, especially since we’ve witnessed the unfortunate demise of daytime cocktails as an acceptable nudge to get the pen moving, so it has been screens and thumbs and bad puns and misquotes and forgettable disputes and even a few tears for more than a decade. Yet this golden age of distraction does seem to be reaching the end of its timeline, with the whimsical and curious and occasionally clever transformed into nothing but grim seriousness. To scroll through a social media feed in 2023 is to notice that the humorless are now in charge of the jokes. And something certainly went horribly wrong once the most monomaniacal user, well, accidentally bought the local shop.

Leaving social media and finding a new place to not work wouldn’t be the worst decision for most writers. If I were to design a truly horrid environment for literature, I couldn’t do much better than design a place where the ironic is always literal, where exaggeration is always fact, where nuance is always witchcraft, and where a changed mind is a mark of weakness. It is also a place where writers are trained to obsess about every word of feedback, which can lead to creating middling, banal sentences that nobody considers the least bit distasteful or, to be redundant, memorable. If nobody reacts to your creations with hate, then I’m pretty sure that nobody reacts with love.

Although leaving social media still forces writers to find someplace else to be inefficient, and how an artist procrastinates seems to depend on what’s being avoided. It does appear that every discipline has its preferred methods. Musicians prefer to get stuck in the technical details of recording or with unending, needless rehearsals; painters always find time to organize their studios or to do preliminary sketches or to make minor tweaks to their canvases; photographers never fail to spend hours on organization and technology and planning.

For writers there might be a clue in these other disciplines, as there’s a looseness, a physicality in how some artists play with the clay or fool around with a palette or sketch with charcoal or strum a guitar long before they begin the actual work—with the procrastination outward, as a physical manifestation, and often related to the art itself. An expert pianist can simultaneously play the piano and believe that time is being wasted: the procrastination, at times, resembles the art. Unfortunately, most writers don’t practice their craft in quite the same way. Most writers don’t practice sentences like a musician plays scales, even though it would help, and most writers don’t play with words on the page like an artist draws aimlessly in a sketchbook, even though that, too, would help.

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Regardless of the art form, however, my sense is that many artists underestimate the role of discipline in creativity. Showing up each day and doing the work almost always triggers more creative moments. The alternative—lounging around and waiting for inspiration—doesn’t seem like the best plan, especially for writers, as they must take inchoate, partial sensations, all the emotional muck and chaotic noise inside the mind, and shape coherent sentences: to take what’s abstract and turn it into something concrete will always be laborious.

But one convenient aspect of writing is that you only need a pen and paper. What’s beyond that might be helpful—a computer, a quiet space, some background music—but it is excess, and searching for just the right environment or the perfect notebook or waiting for an epiphany is almost certainly the root of procrastination for some writers. If you have those two core items, you can write beautiful and evocative and lively sentences whether you’re in a palace or a prison, and you should simply start.