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You ever meet anyone with any kind of attention deficit disorder Alan?

Wiki: Procrastination is defined as the avoidance of doing a task that needs to be accomplished.

It’s not the same as lack of preparedness, or planning, or simply taking time out to think, or refresh – it’s creative avoidance. It’s deciding other tasks are more important than the thing you claim to enjoy. And if you do that, you are uncommitted.

Yeah, ‘procrastination’ i think is simply needing a break from the direct *act* of writing to allow the mental part of it to catch up. It isn’t a flaw, or a failure. Given the number of successful, well established authors I see on Twitter telling themselves off for procrastinating, and yet still going on to publish successful books, I think we…[Read more]

Procrastination is nothing to do with commitment! It is everything to do with recognising that you need something completely different sometimes to get the authorly juices flowing again. I do it – it doesn’t mean I’m not committed at all.

I prefer to call it what it is and look at WHY I’m doing it. If it’s simply time-wasting, then I give myself…[Read more]

Yes, there is that. An idea that added a whole new dimension to one of my novels once came to me while I was laying the table for dinner.

Actually playing something like Freecell occupies the surface part of your brain and liberates the sub-conscious to do a lot of sorting out. Or something like that. My terminology is all wrong.

Not when you’re playing Freecell…

Sometimes what feels like procrastination is valuable thinking time…

That’s a very sweeping statement.

Yes, but struggle and procrastination aren’t the same, are they? All committed writers struggle, but (the way I see it) only the uncommitted procrastinate.

Good point @Richardb about the guitar playing.

And @alainrain, I think we all struggle and procrastinate from time to time because writing can be tough.

Up to my neck in astrolabe pictures and nary an idea as yet. Still, there’s a week left. Plenty of time!

I think it’s just human nature. Before we moved MrsB was a Beaver Scout Leader for twenty years, and over that time I lost count of the number of Beaver/ Cub/ Scout leaders I heard carrying on about what horrors their charges were, what a hard time it all was, and generally giving the impression that they were being put upon and they would rather…[Read more]

@janeshuff I don’t feel guilt at all. Maybe I’m the odd one out?
What does baffle me are writers who admit to not enjoying the actual writing, and that includes all aspects of it, particularly editing. They procrastinate and actually seem proud of it. Or is it all a bluff? If not, Wtf?

Yes, if you tell someone that you play, say, the guitar, they don’t normally up and ask you if you’ve got a recording contract, do they? Though I don’t think I’ve told anybody outside my immediate circle of close friends and family that I write.

Apart from you lot, obviously.

Absolutely @raine. Where does the guilt come from? Because come it does. Every time someone asks me what I’m up to and I have to admit to spending most of my spare time writing but, no, it’s not published. And, yes, I have spent the last seven years doing this. I try to rationalise it by thinking of lots of perfectly acceptable but equally…[Read more]