Nice to see so much academic thought going in to procrastination, although clearly it would make a lot more sense if people just stopped doing it, stopped writing about it, and just did whatever they were putting off, but apparently it’s in human nature not to do that. Some humans more than others. The theory that procrastination can be somewhat helpful (if you analyse why you’re doing it) is an interesting one and the idea of procrastinating productively which I read about in Sage Cohen’s book is also handy … but here’s the cruncher, from this Surowiecki article:

This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy.

I have to admit, although it may not look this way to an outsider, I think I am definitely improving in the anti-procrastination stakes. Having a baby (therefore having about three spare minutes a day, all three of which are suffered through in a sleep-deprived state) means that procrastination becomes almost impossible. It’s either do something now or forever hold your peace, so to speak. Baby sleeps: quick, get something done before he wakes up! Considering that, according both to that quote and my own experience, indulging a whim to procrastinate doesn’t make me happy, I’m happy to be having less chances to do it. Perhaps everyone needs a baby to overcome their procrastination issues?

So quickly with reference to NaNoSuMo, just to demonstrate that I’m really not procrastinating: I had the chance to go through my lists of potential agents (Australian only so far) and I have now made a shortlist of agents to send my proposals to. (It’s literally a short list because half of the agents had messages on their websites saying they are not considering new clients at the moment.) Half of this shortlist is highlighted in green because they’re the ones that I liked more for some reason or another – they represent authors I think are similar to me, for example. One I disliked because you had to telephone first – how scary! And probably a good way to cut down on the submissions they receive, since I think I wouldn’t be the only writer a little bit frightened of having to pitch their novel over the phone. This week’s job is to get a synopsis edited for one of the novels. Yes, I’m still having trouble deciding which one to start with. But that’s not procrastination, that’s just lack of a crystal ball. Wish me luck!

I did promise you all, about three weeks ago (less than a month, which I consider a positive thing), that I would shortly be submitting either or both of my novels to agents (not both at once, of course), and that I would be getting queries out within the month.

Well, I have made a serious attempt at getting a list of agents together, only to be a tad disheartened to find how few there are in Australia (I’d rather look here first … I think there’s something a little Australia-centric about my novels) and then to let life and its other joys overtake my priorities once again.

However, this morning I woke up to an email with the subject line “Your novels” (of course that got my attention), and when I opened it, I realised I had to get a serious move on. It came from someone who I taught in my blogging course the other week (and, it should be said, is also a dear old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in something like decades). It said:

OK sunshine

If I can manage to blog then I reckon you can send those novels to lots and lots of agents!!! I am sure they are brilliant and you will only die wondering otherwise.

If you just read the second paragraph, then that’s quite a fair exchange. It’s the “OK sunshine” that makes me feel like her foot is dangerously near my bottom. But so it should be because as a master procrastinator I do need a few good kicks sometimes!

So, I WILL make progress TODAY. Funnily enough, NaNoWriMo just started yesterday (National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated, and the way I got my first novel drafted a few years ago) and I crazily put it on my to do list (with a lot of question marks and exclamation marks) for yesterday, just in case I decided that I would have enough time to squeeze in writing another novel just now. Obviously that’s impossible (I can’t give up what little sleep I have) but I have decided to create my own NaNoSuMo – National Novel Submitting Month – which does sound a little like a scary Japanese wrestling tournament, so I will just imagine that if I don’t get my novels off to agents soon then there will be oversized, less-polite-than-usual Japanese guys ready to punish me.

So, I had high expectations. This book could be the one to fix all my problems. (To be fair, I already knew in advance that it’s not just a book that I need – I also need to DO SOME WRITING. And stop MAKING EXCUSES. And so on. No book can actually nail my bottom to the chair and hold my hands above the keyboard.)

I’m happy to say that as much as a book could do it, this is the one that could actually help me be a more productive writer. Most of the content could apply to any situation, but the fact that it’s targeted squarely at writers makes it highly relevant and therefore useful. One of my favourite sections is titled “Procrastinate Productively” and includes this advice:

So you don’t feel like writing. Or you’re stuck on something and can’t go any further right now. Or you’re too tired or broke or can’t find your pink slipper. Okay. You are excused. I don’t do that stern schoolteacher, butt-in-chair guilt trip … I would like to propose an alternative … Waste time well. If you do things that need doing—that you’re actually in the mood to do—even procrastination can be productive. One of the things you’ll start to learn over time is your rhythm for settling down to make stuff happen and the times when you need to rearrange your bulletin board a few times and eat lots of cookies.

And I like that advice not just because it mentions cookies!

The Productive Writer has sections which are like the Getting Things Done of the literary world. Sage has advice on organising everything related to being a writer (I like how she says you should “housetrain your books” as soon as they arrive – so they don’t end up in random piles, for example next to the bed – yep, I’m guilty of that!). I know this will sound like I’ve taken none at all of our productivity advice on board, but when I have time (give me a break, I’ve still got a new-ish baby) I will read all this more thoroughly again and actually implement it. I promise.

Speaking of babies, The Productive Writer also addresses the issue of fitting writing in around other parts of your life in a chapter neatly titled “Writing in the Margins of a Full-Time Life”. I read something similar last week too and there’s a particularly salient point for me, and any other mothers or fathers reading this – basically, try to avoid too much multi-tasking and when you’re looking after your kids, look after your kids. When you’re writing, write. I’ve already heard myself say to my baby, who’s still too young to understand but was grizzling on his play mat wanting some attention, “just five minutes and Mummy will have finished this work she needs to do.” Consciously separating these activities, something I’ve been focusing on this week, certainly does make me do both of them better.

I could go on and on, because there was so much in this book that spoke to me, but I’d encourage you to go and read it yourself and find the bits that you need to know. I doubt that any writer out there is already so productive that they couldn’t learn something new. Due out in December, I believe, you can pre-order it at Amazon at the moment – look for Sage Cohen’s The Productive Writer: Tips & Tools to Help You Write More, Stress Less & Create Success.

P.S. As a kind of aside, just because I adore Margaret Atwood (do you follow her on Twitter? You should! – @MargaretAtwood), and because it made me laugh: this story is included in Sage’s book to remind us that writing is not always so easy.

It is rumored that at a party, author Margaret Atwood was speaking to a neurosurgeon who mentioned that he had just retired and was considering writing a book, to which she replied, “What a coincidence! I was thinking of becoming a neurosurgeon when I retire.”

Regular readers will remember I recently decided it was okay to be erfect – or in other words, not quite perfect. Well, lately I’ve been doing even better than that in my fiction writing life, and I can only say that I’ve been “perfectly imperfect”. And that I stole that phrase from Kate’s Picklebums blog where she is currently blogging about being imperfect. Her excuse adds up to four children, including a newborn, whereas I only have one, so I think she’s doing a whole lot better than me.

So why I am imperfect at the moment? Well, the start of it all is that little screen shot up there. Yes, the one that says “tidy office” with an unusually large number of exclamation marks for someone who doesn’t like using them too much, at least not all in a row like that. It is a little difficult to write prolifically when one can’t find the keyboard in one’s office. I would have included a picture of said office but it’s altogether too embarrassing.

A combination of being overseas for a month, coming home and being sick, the little one being sick too, and an increase in “proper” paid work (as distinct from “maybe paid in the future” fiction work), has all led to my fiction writing coming to a complete standstill. My mind is willing but there are just no hours in the day that I’m able to use to even clear the space around my keyboard, let alone type at it (you may well wonder how I’m blogging, then, and the answer is that I’m on my husband’s laptop in another room, but its tiny keyboard is no good at all for prolonged fiction writing. And besides, I can hear the baby waking up as I type).

But I know that things will settle down, we will get healthy, and heck, one day the baby will go to school (why haven’t they made school compulsory for one-year-olds yet? Then I’d be half way there!). Then my fiction writing will be less imperfect. It might even head back towards being erfect.

Deveny is a comedy writer (something I truly admire – I find that very difficult) and she makes her points in very memorable ways. The first most important point is actually a question:

Do you really want to write? Or do you just want to wake up with a novel written by you on your pillow.

Too true. There is a difference between just craving the accomplishment of being able to call yourself a published novelist, and actually wanting to put the hard work in to do the writing as well. Plenty of people dream of the former. Many of them are those that respond to my “claims” that I’m a writer by saying, “Yes, I’ve always wanted to write a book too. I think I will one day.” I know they won’t, and I get angry that they try to make it sound so easy that anyone could do it. As for me, of course I want to be a published novelist, but the process of writing is also important to me.

Deveny also gives a great example of procrastination and why writers (and others) do it. Speaking of a joint project with an experienced writer, she wrote:

We were working on something that had to be finished by Friday. ”I’ll come over Wednesday morning,” I said. ”No,” he replied, ”I won’t be scared enough. Make it Thursday night.”

Which is me to a tee. Even if you’ve barely dabbled in my website here, you’ll very likely have come across a post describing how I’m desperately trying to finish up a novel or a story to enter it in a contest. A deadline is often the only way I really get something done. I’m constantly trying to get better at that, but it’s a struggle. Better to complete something at the last minute than never complete it at all, I guess, but I’m sure the quality could be higher if I took more time and didn’t always have the pressure of a deadline. Anyway, at least I’m reminded that I’m not alone.

Prolific equaled 65 books in 37 years, something I can’t help but admire, because even if his books aren’t quite my thing, they still got published and that’s no mean feat.  How did he write so much? His routine was simple:

Parker wrote five pages a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year.

I love that he gave himself a two-week holiday every year! And he had two days off from writing every week, too. Five pages sounds like a very manageable amount, but I do know first hand the effort required to do that day in, day out, even when you don’t feel like it, or are tired, or have so much other stuff happening in your life.

It all got me wondering about how many books I might be able to write in my lifetime. It’s hard to even figure out how long one takes, because I tend to write in strange sporadic bursts, usually when I set myself a really firm target like a contest entry date or something. But I’ve tried to project forward and imagine that I’m a published writer with a publisher expecting the next book by the end of the year. Would I only write what’s contracted or could I do more than that? I certainly don’t think I’m a slow writer, but of course there’s the matter of quality too. It’s all a bit unknown to me still.

I don’t think I’ll publish 65 novels in my lifetime. I’d be really pleased with perhaps a dozen. Heck, right now I’d be really, really pleased with just one, who am I kidding?! But I take my hat off to those prolific writers out there who are obviously really good at sitting down and actually writing. It’s really nowhere near as easy at it looks.

I usually don’t have much of a problem getting a fair bit of reading done, and with a week away from the day job and a bunch of extra public holidays, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to report back in 2010 with a bunch of great reading recommendations. I just have to hope that the writing goes as well. Well, I shouldn’t hope, rather I should simply make it happen, right? As I’ve done before, with varying success, here I go making a public promise to make substantial progress on my novel revisions during the Christmas break. Please hold me to that.

And in the meantime, all the best wishes of the season to you all, and may Christmas bring you lots of relaxation time and a few good books – and if you’re so inclined, some quiet and successful writing time as well.

• Not having physically much (or any) time to write, if you’re dealing with day jobs, other work, family, friends, dramas, etc. It’s usually possible to find a little time, at least at some stage within a week, but you may not have the energy then.
• Feeling lazy and unmotivated about writing. This might be because you’re mentally not in the right space, because you’re not having much success,  or maybe because you’ve had a burst of recent success and don’t want to take the risk of following up on that.
• Procrastination. It’s so, so easy to convince yourself that other tasks have a higher priority than fiction writing. Well, it’s easy for me to convince myself, anyway.
• Having no pen or no keyboard at hand. Truly, that happened to me a couple of times recently, when I really felt like writing. Or did I really feel like writing just because it was impossible?
• Santa Claus. (The one who lives in Finland, because I met him.)

On some internet wandering recently, I came across a Wikipedia entry about the opposite of writer’s block: hypergraphia.  Apparently it’s not quite a disorder or illness but can be part of one, and it means you have “an overwhelming urge to write”. The Wikipedia page goes on to give examples of people who wrote copious notebooks detailing their everyday life, or wrote the longest novels in the world, and so on. I don’t want to do either of these things, but I must admit that I find it quite easy to write often and at length, as most of the recipients of my drawn-out emails will attest to. But that doesn’t mean it translates into writing what I really want to write – great fiction.

In any case, what all this rambling is meant to get to is this: I don’t have writer’s block. I might have been procrastinating a lot recently, a bit lazy and a bit busy, but I’m not blocked. I don’t entirely rule out the possibility that I might feel that way in the future, but I’ll go back to my very first point: I don’t believe in writer’s block. Do you?

At the same time as giving Becoming A Fiction Writer a bit of a facelift, I’ve been (finally) doing more than just dipping my toes into social media. Once I noticed that even my husband was finally on Facebook and that I can follow Kevin Rudd, Paulo Coelho and somebody’s cat on Twitter, I figured these were the places to be. Or if they’re not, they’re at least quite fun, and great for a procrastinator like myself.

So if you want to follow my fiction writing life a bit more closely, you can do one of two things. Or both. Let me explain:

Follow Becoming A Fiction Writer on Twitter

Over at Twitter, in 140-character bites (that’s pretty short for me – perhaps it’s good discipline), you can hear about my up-to-the-minute fiction writing conundrums. Just find me at befictionwriter and follow me. Chances are I’ll follow you back because I’m a typical nosy writer who wants to know everybody else’s business.

If you’re not sure what Twitter’s all about yet, have a read of Getting started with Twitter.

Become a Facebook fan of Becoming A Fiction Writer

Yes, give me social media love, please! If you’re a Facebook member (and with 175 million of you around the world, the chances are good that you are), you can become a fan of the Facebook Becoming A Fiction Writer page, complete with embarrassing pictures of the very, very early stages of my reading and writing career. (Yes, that’s the bonus you get for hopping over and becoming a fan).

At both Twitter and Facebook I’ll be letting you know just how the whole fiction writing thing is going, and we’ll get some group action going sometime soon. Of course, I have to remember not to let these activities become great procrastination techniques, and I hope you’ll all remind me of that. Hope to see you all over the web!

This is my cat. She’s staring out the window, wondering when all the bird and wildlife action will start. This could be me, staring at my screen, wondering when all the writing action will start. My cat and I have just about the same philosophy on this waiting thing at the moment.

If you’ve met my cat (either of them, in fact) you’ll know that they’re pretty lazy. A lot of resting is involved in their lives, a bit of asking for cuddles and attention, and some eating. That’s about it. As far as action goes, they’re pretty passive about creating it. They just wait.

And the terrible thing is, that’s how my writing’s going at the moment. I have no idea what kind of magical event I’m waiting for, but since I had a great writing burst and got my novel revised and submitted, my fiction writing prowess has gone the way of, well, something that doesn’t exist anymore.

Ideas are still bobbing around in my head, and life is actually not so over-busy that I couldn’t fit in some extra fiction writing time, but it’s just not coming out. This is not writers’ block (I’m not convinced I believe in that yet), this is just fiction writer’s laziness. My current strategy is simply this: if I admit to the world (via this blog) that I’m being lazy about writing fiction at the moment, then I’ll be instantly shamed into starting again. I hope. I’m sure that the inspiration of the coming weekend’s writers festival will get the writing juices flowing too, but I’d like to kickstart them before that. So there you are, now I’m ashamed, and I’m going away to do some fiction writing. (Or cuddle the cat.)