Procrastination Station

Is it too late to get a Schoolhouse Rock on this?

Dear Writer,

You may not have noticed this about me, but I am a Woman of Action. I like to Do Things. Because of this, when it occurs to me to do something, I usually want to do it right now because I am not a Woman of Planning.

I made a decision to start a podcasting company at 6:48 a.m. on February 8, 2017 and by noon… the website was up and I was running with it. I planned…. nothing. I just have a moment of inspiration and then I do whatever it was I thought about.

Dear Writer happened pretty much the same way. The Year of Writing Magically Workshop—same thing. My books all happened that way. As a matter of fact, my husband and I getting together came from a message I sent him in the middle of the night after waking up and deciding he would be the perfect friends with benefits person because we were such good friends and neither of us was really interested in a relationship.

This is what they in psychological circles call, I believe, a pattern.

I’m a pantser. I have no idea what I’m going to write until I sit down to write it. My good friend CJ “Ceej” Barry, my co-host for Will Write for Wine (which also started as a thought one morning and by that afternoon was all set to go), is a planner. When we were doing WWfW and I was writing The Comeback Kiss she asked me how it was going and I was like, “I don’t know who my bad guy is,” and she said, “Aren’t you… like… almost done with it?” and I said, “Yeah,” and she went quiet and drank a big gulp of wine.

I mean, I figured it out before I sent it to my editor, so all was well in the wash but still… my point is… woman of action. I take action, even when that action hasn’t been planned or considered or designed to make the most of my efforts.

I just… do stuff, and my energy goes floating out into the universe with little rhyme or reason and often not a lot of return on my energetic investment. I mean, I’ve had a fair amount of success, but nowhere near the amount of success someone with my level of energetic output would have if they… you know… had a plan.

And yet, knowing that I am a woman of action and I Do Things, I find myself procrastinating.

Because I have a novel to write.

If you think reading Dear Writer is great, imagine getting this letter and a podcast of Lani reading it to you and a monthly writer Q&A for the cost of one cup of coffee a month!

Now, here’s the thing; as you know, I’ve been drafting a novel this year, doing my own work alongside the Year of Writing Magically workshop participants (click the link to get on the mailing list to be the first to know when applications open for 2024, it’s amazing) and writing in community and it’s been awesome. And now I’m at my favorite part… revision.

Except that there’s this period of time at the end of drafting and before revision where you’re supposed to put the book down and try to not think about it as much as possible for at least six weeks and then you can come back to it and start work.

That’s my problem.

See, I already had the rush of Do The Thing and then I went and Did The Thing and now I have to go back and Fix The Thing (and it needs a LOT of fixing, as I’ve discovered during my drawer phase where you’re not supposed to think about it but I’ve been thinking about it and… there is Stuff to Do.)

So what I’ve discovered about myself is that I’m excellent at Doing Stuff as long as I have no idea how hard said Stuff is going to be, what it’s going to demand of me, or what the actual scope of the project is. I just start a thing, and then because I planned absolutely fuck-all nothing, it gets messy. Like when I did half of Season 6 and all of Season 7 of Buffy on YouTube as a video series and then restarted that series as a podcast of the same name.

Like when I started Dear Writer as an instructional writing newsletter and then kind of morphed it into a personal essay space and now am trying to figure out how to put those hands together and sort of mush them until they become what I want them to be.

Like how I started writing this novel with no idea what it was supposed to be and now I know what it’s supposed to be and I have to somehow take all that mess I put on all those pages and tame them into something that appears to others somewhat close to how it appears to me in my head. It’s so much rewriting and revising and rethinking and planning and for a Woman of Action, it’s like…

A lot of my creative friends have experienced procrastination, some to a greater extent than others. For me, it presents as a short period of I Don’ Wanna, and then I find a way to Wanna, and then I do the thing.

Right now, today, I woke up with my Don’ Wanna fading, as is my resistance to Doing The Thing. I can feel the next stage of this coming for me, and sometime in the next few days I’ll be back in the book, and back in Book Brain, where the people I love ask me questions and I nod and then five minutes later I say, “I’m sorry; what did you say?”

I don’t like it.

But I’m gonna do it.

You know… eventually.

Everything,

L