Procrastinate--A Lifetime worth

It's well known most writers fight their own inner demons and find many ways to distract from the work at hand. This act of avoiding the work can take the form of the mundane to the creative. Some are known, including this writer, to clean their desks, organizing papers, receipts, contact lists, ipod music libraries, photo files, basically anything that can be categorized or organized.

There is nothing worse than sitting at the desk, the computer on, your hands on the keyboard, and your mind stuck on a particular word, a word that would make whatever sentence perfect. What's interesting about this process is how hard the work actually is, even if you aren't literally breaking a sweat. People assume writing to be this passive ephemeral act where inspiration will strike and a writer will type away furiously as if possessed by divine intervention. This may happen in Joyce Carol Oates' office, but I'm pretty confident when I say most writers work sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word. It is a process that can be exhilarating but also excruciating.

I have been, for the past five days, working on a particular passage of my book, chapter two in fact. It has been a laborious process of making sure the right words are used to evoke the mood and emotional landscape of the world I've created. Sometimes when I'm stuck, which happens a great deal, I switch over from my book to any number of shopping sites. It can be a dangerous distraction, indeed, as I browse the sites of Net a Porter, salivating over the latest designs by some of my favorite designers. But of late, with the holiday season fast upon us, I find myself shopping on line for holiday cards (yes, we are those annoying people who send out adorable photos of their child), toys from Santa for our son, and just general holiday gear. I wonder how I procrastinated before high speed DSL and before the advent of the plethora of shopping sites. I mean, what did I do before Ebay?

When the mental blockage is really bad, it is better to get up and simply read. Read anything from cookbooks to a 'how to' manual. Sometimes the mere act of reading words put together by someone else can unlock whatever it is that had prevented your own mind from unleashing all of those stopped up words. Or it can serve as a way to pass the remaining hour of your work day. When I had my entire library at hand, I used to browse my own collections, usually taking down a collection of poetry. This was not always a good thing since I would get so caught up in whatever collection I'd taken down for perusal that a few hours would slip by, unnoticed by me. Yes, a lifetime of fine tuning the ways to procrastinate can certainly take the reading of one poem to a few hours wasted.

One of the most amazing things about being here is the limitless opportunities to go hear some of the great writers of our age read their own work. John Ashberry, whose poetry is sublime or simply obtuse, is reading down the street from us tomorrow. I'm astounded he will be down the street, this poet whose work is discussed, dissected, misunderstood in many writing programs across the country. Perhaps today when I am stuck, which will surely happen, I will find a John Ashberry collection, if only I had my library.