Procrastination Kills

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OK, so no one was killed.

For years I’ve been opening my wallet and thinking,

“Why do I carry all these credit cards? Wouldn’t it be a hassle if anything ever happened to this wallet?”

Ever since I began my habit of walking trails — usually combined with going to the library or a coffee shop and writing for an hour or two — I’ve been leaving my bookbag in my car, but thinking,

“I really need to stop leaving my bookbag in my car.”

This small inner prompting was usually greeted with a small inner shrug. “Soon,” I told myself. (Usually I hid it, sort of.)

Soon, I told myself, I would winnow through my cards and perhaps even follow advice and make photo copies of the 2 or 3 I decided to continue to carry. Soon I would come up with a backpack or start dropping my bag at home before I walked. Soon, I would take seriously this persistent inner voice.

In fact I had stopped using my purse, most of the time. I kept my driver’s licence and debit card in my phone wallet, and carried that with me on my walks.

Then, last week, I had my purse and my bookbag with me as I ran errands. I wasn’t going to walk, then I found out that my hubby was supposed to report to Urgent Care for a problem he was having. He wasn’t home, but called me and said he could meet me at home in 30 minutes. I would drive him. That gave me time to stop at a local park and take a 20-minute walk.

My bookbag and purse would be fine for 20 minutes. There were people around. It was broad daylight. No problem!

Right?

Wrong.

I came back to find my passenger door window smashed and my bookbag — and the small purse tucked inside it — gone. The police were called. One of my credit cards sent me a fraud alert (within minutes). Three other cards were successfully used — all within about 1/2 hour. I’m not liable for charges on stolen cards, or so I’m told, but it still felt awful. I felt like an idiot. And I had hours and hours of work ahead of me getting cards canceled, my checking account closed and reopened, and my Euros for my upcoming trip replaced. (I didn’t just feel like an idiot; I was an idiot.)

I lost all the writing time I thought I would have in the week before my trip.

I have had to remind myself that 1) I wasn’t personally harmed and my family is okay (even my husband, whose problem was resolved); 2) I am lucky to have resources and abilities to handle a setback like this; plus, 3) I am pretty good at learning from the bad stuff and this event proved an especially great teacher.

This also made me remember something that happened in (or to) my writing life many years ago. My daughters were young, I had my first full-time teaching job, and I told a writing friend that I would write…later. I may have said that maybe I wouldn’t ever get back to writing. In any case, I gave the clear impression that despite an MFA in poetry and all my huge writing goals, which my friend knew all about, I was going to put off writing.

She wrote me a letter — old school, sat down and wrote it in long-hand and mailed it to me (of course, that happened more often back then, but we did have email). She said something like this:

No one cares if you write. The world is not going to come and pound on your door and insist that you write. No one will miss it if you don’t write. They won’t even know. Meanwhile, life will unfold. You’ll get older. You’ll get farther and farther from your writing dreams. Eventually you’ll say to your grandchildren, “I used to write.” But your grandchildren won’t especially care either. It makes no difference whether you write or not. EXCEPT TO YOU. A place inside YOU will dry up and never be expressed if you don’t write. YOU will miss it. YOU will care. The only way to keep your writing alive, to keep this important part of yourself alive, is to write.

I probably have this letter somewhere. I should have framed it. I took it seriously (even though it was like that small, inner voice that I so often don’t heed). And I kept writing. Often, I didn’t have much time; I had little kids for a lot of years; I had a teaching career; I had teenagers and a mother who was ill. Nonetheless, I made a little time every day and I wrote. Some days the little bit of time turned into enough time.

And it has mattered. It has mattered to me. Writing has sustained me and saved me and even made things like parenting and teaching richer and more enjoyable. I am glad that I kept writing.

So this is what I want to say to you today. Is your small inner voice nagging you to do something? (To write?) Take 5 or 10 or 15 minutes right now (no one will miss you for 5 minutes), and do it. (Writing, or whatever it is.)

If you don’t, if you procrastinate (i.e., if you never do it), no one will be killed (probably). But I guarantee you’ll be glad that you took the time.

Are you neglecting your blog?

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I have been sadly neglecting my blog, but working on other projects — one of which is a picture book for the family about my parents’ lives. Another of which has been reading poetry each morning (and writing one-bad-poem of my own). When I came across this poem by Ted Kooser, I thought of this picture from the family archives.

The Great-Grandparents

As small children, we were taken to meet them.
They had recently arrived from another world
and stood dumbfounded in the busy depot
of the present, their useless belongings in piles:
old tools, old words, old recipes, secrets.
They searched our faces and grasped our hands
as if we could lead them back, but we drew them
forward into the future, feeling them tremble,
their shirt cuffs yellow, smoky old woodstoves
smoldering somewhere under their clothes.

-Ted Kooser (from Kindest Regards: New and Selected Poems; Copper Canyon Press, 2018)

How to Begin

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I have a couple of friends who tell me that they are thinking of putting together a book. I’m thinking of putting together a class (fall?) for how to put together a book. None of us seems to be making much progress toward our intended goals.

How to begin a book is how you begin anything. You begin.

When I walk, I am often a bit pressed for time. I’m negotiating with myself as I set out, thinking that maybe just five minutes today…well, okay, maybe fifteen minutes. I set the timer on my phone for 7 1/2 minutes, knowing that if I turn around when it chimes, I’ll get my fifteen.

From one of my recent walks — I think this is elderberry in bloom, but I need to check.

But at the end of 7 1/2 minutes, I think, I could do 7 1/2 minutes more. Often, I do about 30 minutes in and 30 minutes back — it must have to do with that thing we learned in fifth grade about bodies in motion (they tend to stay in motion).

Writing is like that, too. But how is writing a book like that?

My best advice for the beginning of a book is to find a move, make a movement, that will actually look like building a book. For me the very early steps are these:

  1. choose a notebook (I have a ton of these, to be repurposed, though sometimes I splurge and buy a new one)
  2. create a title page — even if you know it’s a “working title” and not something you’ll keep (remember, you’re just getting yourself into motion)
  3. write a dedication (my mystery novel is dedicated to my friends and it is in memory of my mother, who read nothing but mystery novels)
  4. choose an epigraph or two (mine is from Agatha Christie; without looking it up, I think it goes — “I do think you should be more careful in how you choose your friends.”)

From there, you can begin sticking pages in, even if they aren’t in order. From now on, whenever you can find fifteen minutes to work (whether daily or weekly), you’ll know where your pages are. When you aren’t inspired to write, you can still work at scribbling in margins, moving pages around, or listing ideas for bits you want to write.

I could add something about getting your work “off-line” and onto actual pages — there’s some brain science to back up how important it is — but I’m working at the library in the middle of a walk, and now I need to go home to dinner.

Do let me know how your book is coming along! (And I’ll let you know if I make progress on creating the class.)

What Are You Writing?

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A friend, a former student from my college teaching days, has been revisiting her goal of writing her memoir and she’s been sending me pieces of it.

I have loved her story, and her writing, from the time I first met her, and I love it still. But when she said she was back at work on the memoir — despite working more than full-time in a stressful, human-services job, despite all the usual drama with marriage and barely grown-up children — I expected to see the same old pieces, pulled up from the archives, re-read and maybe fluffed up a little, like pillows on a guest bed. I didn’t expect that I was inviting a deluge of new and (sometimes) shockingly revealing chapters in her life story.

She always prefaces the pieces with “editing welcome,” or “you know I’m crap at punctuation.” But my feeling right now is that the sentences, the commas, her chronic it’s / its confusion (!) do not matter at all. DO. NOT. MATTER. What matters is that she stays open to the flood of these memories, experiences, and insights into her own life. What matters is that she keeps writing them down. If, by being willing to read them, I can encourage that flood, then I’m happy to. I’m privileged to be her witness.

Meanwhile, I’m working on the last act of my mystery novel (it is — gasp — actually drafted now, actually typed up, and not just a rough outline) and I am trying to imagine sharing it with my beta readers.

It feels as though I have to be hugely brave to do this. It makes me quake. I go back over the sentences and try to make them better. I add commas and take commas out.

I hesitate. I fret. I get all tied-up in knots.

How is it that my friend can send her memoir pieces to me with such trust that I will handle them gently, that I won’t judge them, that I’ll point out what I love about them and ask for more?

Which is exactly what my beta readers have done, by the way. So where does this fear come from? What is it that makes me start questioning every little thing (should the protagonist’s dog not be an English bulldog but some other breed? what if I took her daughter out of the story completely? am I getting away with all the backstory? is there going to be a romantic element, or do I let that go? sure, it’s okay, but what else could happen??????)

Hmm. The truth is that if I hadn’t given the first 2/3 of this story to my readers, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have drafted the last third. I was bogged down. I was doubting whether anyone would ever read it, or why they would, and I was feeling kind of like there was no point to finishing it. Having readers was what made me plow through. I’ve had the final chapters drafted for a few days now. I’ve reread and marked them up and typed in the new changes, and I think — for now — I’ve taken them as far as I can.

And I know this from my other projects and from working with scads of students over the past 30 years:

It’s never perfect.

It’s never perfect, just as we’re never perfect, but it will get better. That’s all part of the writing process.  Once you’ve drafted it, you’ll be able to revise it. You will make it better.

And if having a reader helps with the process, then it isn’t too early to share it. If it helps with the process, it helps with the process.

This morning, I’m channeling my memoir-writing friend. I’m printing out my pages (again) and I’m picturing smiling hugely and saying thank you and handing them over.