Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Set a time slot everyday where you will sit down and do nothing but work on creating your art. Doesn't matter if it's good or bad, your only job is to sit there and create for the whole time period. That's the key, is consistently trying to do it.
I highly recommend reading the The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, he goes into this a lot more - https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1...
He also talks about the concept of "Resistance", which is basically a force of nature that's works against you getting things done, and that gets stronger the closer you are towards doing work that is meaningful to you.
"Blank Page" refers to having a separate notebook, or open document page on your computer, that you write why you don't want to write, during your time period.
If I don't want to write, I write that: "I don't feel like writing today. It's not going to mean anything, or I'm bored with the story. Today wasn't that good of a day.." etc. Eventually, it dumps the things distracting you, and after five minutes I'm typically back into writing my actual work.
Creative endeavors/procrastination has always been interesting to me, as I haven't had an issue dumping 90-120 hours into different employers, but have the issue with my own writing.
This is also a tool used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in various forms of use, namely, sleep. If you can't sleep at night, sometimes you need to dump everything in your brain on paper (which many times turns into a huge to-do list).
I tried this for gamedev, just for some background. I've been putting off starting some sort of one-off game in Unity even though people scream at me "just make something!!". I thought about why I was hesitating to do so, and wrote down a Blank Page. Here's a few notable things I came up with:
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> It's too hard on my own.
Games are multimedia projects. They incorporate audio, video, input, networking, etc. Game development teams are composed of experts in each of the fields the game touches. It's like making a movie, and making an entire movie on your own is somewhere between extremely difficult and laughably impossible.
> It involves a lot of planning.
In order to make games the "right" way, you need to design the right way from the very beginning. There's a lot of prep work ("preproduction") that involve determining gameplay systems, art and sound direction, and a whole bunch of other things in advance.
> It's not something I already know how to do.
True, nobody is born knowing how to make a game. But that just means you need to gain the skills in order to do so, which involves learning said skills, which involves time and effort. Therefore...
> It's a big time investment.
Making a game is in fact a significant time investment. Even if you're offloading graphics and netcode work to someone or something else, you still have to write gameplay code, playtest, debug, redesign, and iterate. Games can and often do take on the order of years to develop. And even outside of developing the actual game itself, the skills needed to even start (e.g. programming, game design, art, etc.) are things that people spend their entire lives mastering.
> I won't really be able to make something worthwhile.
Even if you do spend your free time putting your game together to the point where you're happy with its polish and development, it can still ultimately be an uninteresting failure - in which case, all that time and effort is arguably time not well spent. That's a huge blow, especially in a day and age where free time is at a premium. This makes trying to make a game a much less appealing prospect. And even if someone can make something worthwhile, it'd be after a few games that aren't as great anyway, so that time and effort spent multiplies.
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Writing this down actually helped me put my concerns into words: games are not single-person endeavors, even for relatively simple ones. Books can be written by a single person since they only touch upon a very specific subject and field that's reasonable for a single person to handle, but games are a very different beast that tie together many different disciplines. To put it in software development terms, books are comparable to web apps and command-line utilities, while games are more comparable to operating systems and enterprise software.
That's not to say the Blank Page exercise isn't worth it, not at all - it's very helpful for organizing your thoughts and for self-reflection, and you can see how it helped me. But sometimes, if you procrastinate so much over doing something, the reality is that you might just not want to do it in the first place.
It'd certainly be fun to work as a game developer and learning about game design is fascinating (if mindblowingly complicated), and I might be open to working as a game dev on a team sometime in the future, but at that point, it's much like any other dev job. I like games, I can tell you that, and I want to see more games of the kind that I like, but I'm certainly not learned or developed enough to put those games together myself.
After making some small things like that, you'll see how easy it is to just jump into some cool idea you've been thinking about. If you don't do this, and instead just plan out some big multi-person hobby project, there is literally 0% chance it will ever get finished, or even started. It's literally never been done before.
https://hero.handmade.network/episodes
I think it's really cool to see Casey walk through all the steps that go into figuring out how to make the game on stream. I skipped the very beginning, as it was pretty windows specific, but the first episode I watched was really cool:
https://hero.handmade.network/episode/win32-platform/day021
He sets up auto-hot reloading of the C++ game code, to cut down on dev time.
It's actually a large body of work, (more than 100 hours!), and even watching at x2 speed, it'll take a long time to get through all the videos, but I think they are pretty informative, and fun to watch.
> It's too hard on my own.
It can be, but it really does depend on the scale of what you're making: there's a large class of games that aren't too difficult for individuals, and a large class that are; and, in the class of approachable games, there are still fun, interesting, novel projects that can be undertaken.
> It involves a lot of planning.
This is one thing you'll learn to find a balance with by writing games. There is too much and too little planning. Don't worry too much about making them the 'right' way to begin with. In my own case I intentionally didn't look up any info. on the correct way of making games until I'd tried my own way first (which is much more fun and worked out fine). After doing that, looking up established practices was way more interesting (and my own approaches were laughably bad in comparison—but ya learn!).
> It's a big time investment.
Some are, some aren't. As others have mentioned, you can make a quick game in two days or so. More importantly though, I'd say to try it out and see if you enjoy the process: if you don't, then the time investment probably will be too much, and you could end up spoiling your love for games in general. If you do enjoy it then, whatever the final outcome of the game, it was time well spent.
> I won't really be able to make something worthwhile.
You may get ambitious about it one day after you've developed your skills to a certain extent, and find yourself with a greater interest in sharing an experience through your game than in working on it. If you get to that point, you're now in the realm of working on art, and that's got its own whole host of difficulties.
You should scale your expectations down, come up with the most simple, minimum viable product. If you still don't feel the scale is small enough, try to break off a chunk of that MVP you think you /can/ complete.
Then try.
You're probably going to make an initial version as you're learning, and your design is either going to radically change as you learn more about the problem you're actually trying to solve and the tools you're solving it with, or you'll end up throwing it away and refactoring the entire thing when you do have an understanding.
Then, when you've got something that works, you'll start tweaking it. Making X better, or adding Y; or even removing Z because you realize it isn't something that should be there.
That's the programming equivalent of the 50 pots thing. Each iteration you run being like a small test-firing, and each deployment being like a pot you actually feel like putting through use tests.
I didn't interpret it as a way of getting creative in the qualitative sense of "creative" but rather in the "productive" sense. To that end, the exercise you went through and shared supports that notion.
The videos in that link seems to be down, but the whole talk is worth a watch: https://vimeo.com/121544005
-- From "Art and Fear"
Good discussion and references here: http://tikalon.com/blog/blog.php?article=2013/technology_pro...
J. Doyne Farmer discusses this extensively in his work (referenced above).
You're making me want to dig deeper into this area of study. Thanks.
If university taught me anything, it's that most people don't seem to be just interested in learning.
Does it not weigh 50 pounds??
Also, it is very reasonable to assume that a student graded by quality would practice a lot and discard (and learn with) the worst pots.
I write only in cafés, so watching other people is my main distraction, but surfing the net and checking emails is also nice from time to time. Procrastination is an important part of writing, I don't see what the problem is with it. Are there still writers who are paid by page/minute?
Personally, I don't trust machine gun writers' writing very much. Whether it's creative or scientific writing, nobody can think that fast, and producing good texts takes a lot of time, corrections and rewriting anyway.
Now if I only knew how to sell my German Sci-Fi novels and make at least a little bit of money from them. That's the real problem. :-/
Sadly, in the German book market Sci-Fi is almost dead. The reason for this is not so bad, though. There are so many outstanding English writers that originals and a few translations here and there cover almost the entire program segments of the traditional publishers.
Unfortunately, Amazon is not the ideal solution either. They are kind of evil and universally hated by bookstores. It feels a bit like selling your soul to the devil.
Also, totally a personal experience thing, but I've tended to favor music creation when in "cheerful" head space (usually summer) and gravitate more toward writing projects when in "downer" like conditions (usually winter). They barely overlap, and the pattern has taken me years to notice, but it's there. I've frequently felt like creativity in my realm is not often controllable, but more like an eruption to be harnessed. Thus the discipline and "making time" for hobby-like efforts in the creative realm is where the real effort and hang-ups tend to happen for me.
Laziness is a virtue; at least among programmers. "Writers" just use different language.
Writing to say you write is just creating needless noise at best, and perhaps a kind of technical debt at the worser ends.
If you have something to write, write it. If you don't, you don't (because you are doing something else).
If it weren't for Nanowrimo and being reminded consistently to participate in a short story anthology every year, I'd be a writer who didn't write (except comments on HN/Reddit).
Problem is that information snacks like news and forums are the intellectual equivalent of vending machine junk food. We know it's better for us to cook our own food but we get lazy. Same with forum posts. We feel like we're actually doing something when we're not.
Mostly no, but sometimes yes. I've not found a more thought provoking place of discourse than HN, and have been referred to a number of good books on here.
There are comments that are superior to the article they're responding to. There are books that are better off not being read at all. Forums also serve a few purposes that raw reading material cannot.
I think moralizing the activity brings with it the peril that you may start feeling good about consuming information the "right" way, and feel bad about consuming it the "wrong" way, while what you should really care about is the information itself. How you get it doesn't really matter.
Granted, I don't see anything particularly virtuous or advantageous about cooking your own food, either, so perhaps we're at an impasse...
But baring that, restaurant food is generally too salty and fatty and light on fresh vegetables to be healthy to rely on for most meals. There are exceptions, but those restaurants tend to be drastically more expensive.
But there are alternatives to cooking and going to restaurants that are often frowned upon, yet nonetheless allow you to get everything you need and are already drastically cheaper in many cases:
- canned food;
- frozen food;
- meal replacements;
- supplements.
I think the reason writing in the forum style is exciting is because having an audience for anything you do is exciting. Also, you can teach, moralize, scandalize, etc and get near-realtime reactions to the thread being teased in the writings.
I think the risk would be that if a writer edited too heavily based on feedback, the work ceases to be purely the writer's and now it's a collaborative effort, which may lead to an impersonal writing style or threaten one's claim to copyright.
In my opinion, the best place for an app like this is within Reddit. You have the willing audience already in-place to offer you the feedback. Although, I could imagine an unfiltered forum might present a distraction. There might need to be a separate forum moderator that can control visibility of comments to the writer.
And then when they're done they could export it to a text editor of their choice, or save it to dropbox or something.
I once made a chat app in Flash a long time ago called Mimic, that would take in whatever you said, infer connections between words (based entirely on what words were next to other words, so you could use just about any language or slang you wanted), and then build a sentence off that in response, that would almost kind of make sense. I would a good hour or more at a time responding to that thing trying to train it and getting a kick at the silly things it said.
This would be kind of like that. Yes, it'd be a pretty dumb app, but I could see myself being entertained by it, so maybe it'd be entertaining to other people as well.
Heck, one of my favorite plot ideas came when I was taking a SciFi lit class in college, and the final had a short response where we had to sketch an original short story concept.
This started as a comment in a G+ thread, _including_ the 37 footnotes: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/5l_8MqtVwLLvX_DabPjY-g
This got written (along with the research for the numbers) because I'd gotten sufficiently pissed off at zero-information-basis discussions on the topic: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ
A re-share of a meme that struck me as slightly too-good-to-be-true inspired this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/39w8u4/jp_morg...
Follow-ups to the Google numbers piece above inspired this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
I've also used forums to try out ideas I'm developing, solicit feedback, etc., etc.
Most of my writing is nonfiction and explores topics, or reports on findings based on explorations, usually of literature within one or more fields.
And I've considered shopping a few of these pieces around, though I've not yet done so.
Obviously there are some differences - there's a more specific barrier to making software that is functional serves it's intended purpose, compared to a story that might be badly written. But I think "I'm working on an app" may be our generation's version of the "I'm writing a novel" cliche
In other terms, image as coder you are paid by number of lines you produce. And there is no compiler, no unit tests...
Also, the longer the writing project, the more potential for procrastination. 1000 word articles are easier to wrap up than 10,000 features or books...
I believe things like this can only be properly understood through empathy, and all the talk about millennials and hard work and procrastination, being blame behavior, is already putting one in the wrong mindset.
Perhaps the author should try writing some heavy books, herself.
I don't believe talent is innate or anything like that (which seems to be the main assumption in the article, that people who procrastinate believed skill is fixed). I believe full well anyone can become a better writer.
It's just my ambition is probably higher than my actual skill level, and I simply can't accept anything I don't see as 'perfect'. So I get stressed, take a break to do something else, get stressed even more and only get the determination to finish on some random day when I feel like finishing everything.
On another note, I wonder how much worse this 'imposter syndrome' and 'perfectionism' has become with the move to CMS systems like WordPress?
Because if you install certain plugins for those scripts (like Yoast), it grades everything you write according to a Flesch–Kincaid readability test. As a result, I find it's very easy to get distracted and worried by the giant warning saying 'improvement required' and end up focusing more on that than what you're actually supposed to be writing about.
Makes me wonder how many writers have been left paralysed with the fear their work isn't 'good enough' simply because of the script they use to write their work in...
On the other hand, there are professionals: people who create for a living. (I am not talking about extraordinary people like J.K Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien but people who have to work every day just to fulfill a need of the market) If you decide to go this route then idealistic thinking is (mostly) out of the question. If I had to write a pop song or light fiction I'd just do it. All that is required is knowing the basics of your craft and top down planning and then you just work through the list like a maniac. It may be hard work but it's easy to do because there are no contradictions. It's like knowing that you have to walk 10k to get back home. That may be inconvenient but you quickly realize that you have to do it and then you simply do it.
1) I may not like what I write even though I _know_ I won't be any good at the start (or ever).
2) Although I know the style I want to write in and read that style a lot, I can't think of a good plot and so I convince myself that I need to do this before even beginning to write. If that makes _any_ sense at all.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/robert-hanks/on-putting-things-...
[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance?language=enShe has set a self imposed 100 word minimum per day and has been going over 3 months now in an attempt to combat this type of procrastination.
It seems to not only be working for her but people who read about what she's doing have also been motivated (but not me, and it's past my bed time ;)) to work on their own projects whatever they may be.
Projecting much?
I am, and know tons of writers and few are procrastinators, so from the start I find this idea goofy at best.