Fort Myers Florida Weekly

Wait, wait, don’t write this … yet

ARTS COMMENTARY



 

 

When I told a friend I was going to attend the Sanibel Island Writers Conference, she asked me what I hoped to get out of it.

“I wanna pick up some new tips on how to procrastinate,” I told her.

Procrastinating is a shared joke among writers, though not always a funny one.

It’s almost universally acknowledged that this thing we love to do, this profession we’ve embraced, is the thing we also procrastinate doing the most.

That’s because writing is hard work.

Even for writers.

Maybe especially for writers.

I have a friend who thinks that writers sit down and the words just flow out of us, as if dictated by angels.

Nope.

On rare occasions it may happen that way if we’re particularly inspired or in the flow, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would describe it.

But it’s rare.

Even those of us who are journalists, who have deadlines, sometimes wait until the last minute to write our stories.

It drives the editors crazy.

 

 

But (mostly) we meet our deadlines.

At the conference, I heard novelist and poet Steve Kistulentz say that he’ll sit and watch episodes of “Hawaii Five-0” (the new version) and his friends will send him emails or text him, telling him to “sit and write his &%#@ book.”

“But it’s research, kinda,” he said, mocking himself.

So I decided to ask a number of different writers at the conference what their favorite form of procrastination is, and also the converse: what do they do to kick-start their writing?

Some were vague, some didn’t even want to talk about procrastination.

The first person I asked was Mr. Kistulentz himself, whose novel, “Panorama” was released in April.

His response: “I love to watch simple stories done well. It helps me think about whether I’m being kind to the reader in the stories that I want to tell. And it teaches you a certain structure. The hour-long drama has rules.”

 

 

And to jump-start himself he returns to his favorite books, “particularly writers like Don DeLillo, Fitzgerald, Lydia Davis. I find if I’m reading well, I’m writing well,” he said.

Best-selling food writer Michael Ruhlman doesn’t lay claim to any favorite form of procrastination, but confessed, “I check Twitter, Instagram and respond to emails. I get a lot of questions about food and cooking and answer those. Then you’ve wasted all that time.”

To kick-start his writing, “I try to work in 90-minute bursts. I turn everything off and work. Too many distractions. I’m a rip-the-Band-Aid-off kind of guy. Just start writing.”

Tod Goldberg, whose crime novels (“Gangsterland,” “Gangster Nation”) make me laugh, brightened at the question. “I have so many forms of procrastination,” he said. “My number one form is eating every single thing in the house. And then encouraging my wife to take me to Target for things I don’t need to eat.

“I start off with chocolate-covered almonds. Next, I go to the ice cream. Then to the meats and cheeses.

“My second form of procrastination: I’m a devoted user of social media. And I can spend hours arguing with people on the internet.”

But when it comes down to the business of getting down to business, he has his methods: “A trick I learned from Donald Westlake, the late, great crime writer, was that he never wrote to the point where he was worn out. He stopped when he was hot, so that when he picked up the next morning, he’d start up from there. Leave the page when you still have something to say. It was the best advice I ever got from a writer.”

“I always carry a notebook for when things strike me,” said marvelous short story writer Lynne Barrett, founder and editor of The Florida Book Review and teacher in the MFA program at Florida International University. “I take on too many responsibilities, so there is not any time to waste, and therefore, I don’t procrastinate.

“If I don’t have a project I’m working on, I go through my notebooks and find something that kick-starts my imagination … if I can decipher it.”

Associate professor of journalism at Florida Gulf Coast University and author of “The Allure of Immortality: An American Cult, a Florida Swamp, and a Renegade Prophet,” Lyn Millner, declared her forms of procrastination as boring, then named them: “Crossword and Sudoku. Obsessively.”

And the way she kick-starts her writing, she said, is “The habit of writing in the morning. And coffee.”

Her husband, poet Jesse Millner, an instructor in FGCU’s Department of Language and Literature, gave the most succinct answer.

What jump-starts him?

“The mortal dread of my imminent death.”

Others had a different view. Poet, novelist and memoirist Jill Bialosky, who is the executive editor and vice president at WW Norton & Company, said, “If you can do it, do something else. I’m grateful for the time I can find to write. This sounds Pollyanna-ish, but I wake up in the morning knowing the first thing I want to do is write. I think that when you’re working on a novel or a book, what happens while you’re sleeping is, you can solve problems. You’re letting your unconsciousness work for you.

“If you’re stuck on something, you find a solution. I think, ‘This is missing.’ And you find the missing piece.”

However, sometimes before writing, Ms. Bialosky will do housework, though she swears it’s not procrastinating, just her keen desire for organization. “Sometimes I have to clean my apartment first, to focus,” she said.

John Dufresne, author of novels such as “Love Warps the Mind a Little,” “No Regrets, Coyote” and the instructional book “FLASH! Writing the Very Short Story,” also said he didn’t procrastinate. But as a teacher in the MFA program at Florida International University, he confessed, “I do grade papers before I write. I have this Catholic thing where I’m guilty. I have to do my schoolwork.” He might grade five papers, then do some writing.

“I try to be steady with the schoolwork, and do a little every day. That’s how I write, too.

“I have a lot of (writing) exercises that I do, if I’m stuck. For example, I’ll ask the character to tell me something about herself. I write flexibly. If I can’t write a scene, I’ll rewrite something else.”

Julianna Baggott, who’s written a number of books, including the acclaimed young adult dystopian trilogy of “Pure,” “Fuse” and “Burn” and is an associate professor at Florida State’s college of Motion Picture Arts and the Vermont College of Fine Arts, almost seemed insulted by the question.

“I don’t believe in procrastination,” she declared. “If you want to do something else, do it. If your life allows you time to procrastinate, more power to you.

“I have zero patience for procrastination. I have four kids, I’m a full-time professor and I wrote 25 books. You can imagine … I’m not gonna screw around!

“Time is limited. Life is short.

“Get to your desk.”

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