I'm Painting My House Which Can Only Mean One Thing...

Yes, I'm on a deadline

This month our theme is planning as those who attended my creative meet-up will remember, and my catch-up post last week touched on something else that goes hand-in-hand with that – procrastination. My warning was, don’t let all that planning up front mean you don’t make it to the page.

And yet… and yet…

I was chatting with my bestfriend, Jane, a couple of days ago and she asked me: ‘So what have you been up to? How’s work going?’

‘Well, I haven’t achieved much this week,’ I told her, despondently. ‘I’m procrastinating.’

‘Oh, Annie,’ she said, ‘do I need to remind you of your process?’

What she outlined for me was my writing process from start to finish, the hyper-focus on the interviewing process, sometimes even a great start out of the blocks, and then, a sort of chugging halt, as if this little engine inside me has run out of petrol and is limping down the road when it should be going at top speed towards its final destination i.e the deadline.

It is during this time that my house gets A LOT of attention. On Friday, for example, I moved my sofa from the living room to the kitchen, my loveseat from my green room to the living room, and my kitchen table to my green room creating a dining room for the first time. But alas, I thought, when I stood back and looked at it, not the right table for that room, too rectangular, yes… definitely the wrong shape, and material, yes, definitely too…woody. What I need is something round I thought, once I’d made myself a little desk at that table on Saturday and sat down to work for a few hours. I consulted with friends, they agreed. Something round, and glassy. Why not?

And, actually, I thought as I looked up and around me, it’s not the right colour for that room anymore. No, if I’m going to sit in here and write from now on this room needs to be much lighter. So the green room is now going to need to become a blue room I’ve decided. And once it is, ooh the books that I will write in that room. I can see it now.

Do you remember when Carrie split up from Big (again)? Well, anyway, her blue phase, that’s what I’m in.

So the decision was settled, now I had chosen not only a new table and chairs (vintage space age), but the blue (Bay Area Blue for any Farrow & Ball fans out there), and now there was only one thing for it…

No, not work, silly! More painting. The outside of my house needed a white wash because when I had moved all that furniture around on Friday I had happened upon a ten-litre tub of white masonry paint. And so I did that on Sunday instead of writing – well it made sense, no?

But the point is that all this procrastination, it serves a purpose, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself because Jane is right, this is the exact same process every time, and it is vital to my process. Because right after I do all this procrastination, this moving around of furniture, or painting my house, or cooking or cleaning, or whatever else it is I do to distract me from the task in hand, a book is born.

And it reminds me every time of that bit in childbirth where mothers say ‘I can’t take this any more’ and midwives glance at one another and know that a few moments later a baby will arrive.

Apparently there is some science behind this art of procrastination, and it is common among writers (I mean, come on, as if I need to tell you lot that).

Julia Hess wrote a great blog on procrastination here, and in it, she mentions the science bit.

“Recent scientific studies have sought to disprove the idea that all procrastination is bad, and they’ve actually distinguished the difference between “active” procrastinators and “passive” procrastinators. When people think of procrastinators, they usually think of people who are lazy and just can’t make a decision, or who don’t act in a timely manner — these are the passive procrastinators, and this type of procrastination can be self-destructive.

“Active procrastinators, on the other hand, are people who thrive under the pressure of an upcoming deadline. Even if they experience the impulse to do something else, or they need external motivation, they’re choosing to procrastinate because they know it’ll help them produce better writing.

“Their awareness of how they lack self-regulation means they often have stronger decision-making and time management skills, making them a little better at self-regulation than they might realise.”

Better time management skills, me? Oh, I’m blushing.

You see I don’t think procrastination in the middle of a project is only about running the clock down so you feel the deadline pressing up against you, I think it’s necessary in terms of letting your brain play and wander before you get down to the business of serious work, or this hyper-focus that is necessary to get the thing done.

My brain has had a nice little play over the last few days and I know I’m not done yet – after all, gotta paint all that blue, haven’t I?

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott talks about her own procrastination. She realised that the way she needed to work was to allow herself this time to procrastinate and then get to her desk and write, what she describes as, the ‘shitty first draft’. And ta-dah! Out it came.

Eventually – as I too am describing – Lamott accepted this was her process:

“….because by then I had been writing for so long, I would eventually let myself trust the process — sort of, more or less.”

My bestfriend is right, this is mine, it’s classic Anna-Gets-A-Book-Written process, why hadn’t I seen it coming until she pointed it out? But what I’m trying to demonstrate is that there is a difference between this mid-book procrastination, and the fear of the blank page procrastination that I warned of last week.

I too have written many books and I’ve had to learn to trust my process, though I get the ‘sort of’ Lamott adds to the end of her sentence because even though I know this, I always still have to hold my nerve and there is always this slightly scary feeling that this time I don’t get back to the page, maybe I just continue moving furniture around my house for the rest of my life and everyone realises I was a fraud after all, that I can’t write, that those other ten books were just flukes.

Or maybe all that jeopardy is the necessary motivator?

By the end of this week I promise I will have another edited 20,000 words. I also know that on the other side of this procrastination, there is going to be a new book in existence in the world.

Ooh, and my dining room will look so much better blue!

• I’d love to know your relationship with procrastination… let me know in the comments.

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