9 ms·

Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators

163 points by agarden 10y ago

Jimmy 10y ago
Dear God, please don't inflate their egos further...
pattisapu 10y ago
Compare Robert Hanks, "On Putting Things Off" http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/robert-hanks/on-putting-things-off http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/robert-hanks/on-putting-things-...
vanillajs 10y ago
you were 'too good' in english class? so what you're saying is you were proabably garbage at math?
projektir 10y ago
I'm getting a strong impression that the article wanted to talk about hard work, growth mindset, and participation trophies, and not actually analyze why writers put off writing. I believe things like this can only be properly understood through empathy, and all the talk about millennials and hard work and procrastination, being blame behavior, is already putting one in the wrong mindset. Perhaps the author should try writing some heavy books, herself.
jkot 10y ago
In my experience most writers are paid by word, and write very fast. Most content writers at Upwork seems to have very little procrastination.. In other terms, image as coder you are paid by number of lines you produce. And there is no compiler, no unit tests...
- frandroid 10y ago
  If the managers call it "content", it's yeoman's work, and you're not going to get a lot of good writing in; the writers will phone it in. Also, the longer the writing project, the more potential for procrastination. 1000 word articles are easier to wrap up than 10,000 features or books...
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  It's staggering to me how practice on a keyboard has transitioned to very, very fast train of thought typing. Compared to "thoughtful" writing - such as a fiction piece - it's easily 3 or 4 times faster.
kdamken 10y ago
Don't worry about what this article talks about. If you're a writer, or an artist, or a musician, etc and are having trouble getting things done, the solution is as simple as this: Set a time slot everyday where you will sit down and do nothing but work on creating your art. Doesn't matter if it's good or bad, your only job is to sit there and create for the whole time period. That's the key, is consistently trying to do it. I highly recommend reading the The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, he goes into this a lot more - https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1936891026/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1... He also talks about the concept of "Resistance", which is basically a force of nature that's works against you getting things done, and that gets stronger the closer you are towards doing work that is meaningful to you.
- ggambetta 10y ago
  Yep, I agree with this. I wrote my first novel during my daily commute (40 minutes each way), and part of the trick was getting into the habit of opening my laptop as soon as I sat down. I also discovered a lot about writer's block. I wrote about the whole thing here: https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-novel-during-my-daily-commute-e1d02c9447b9 https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-nov... (the companion article about the open source pipeline to get it published was discussed in HN earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311200)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - littleweep 10y ago
    Very interesting! Would love to see your Dan Brown novel scene breakdown spreadsheet out of curiosity if you were open to sharing it.
- salemh 10y ago
  I'm an amateur writer / hobbyist. Having had a decade+ practice of this back-and-forth procrastination with my writing, I'd add "blank page" to War of Art and your excellent comment. "Blank Page" refers to having a separate notebook, or open document page on your computer, that you write why you don't want to write, during your time period. If I don't want to write, I write that: "I don't feel like writing today. It's not going to mean anything, or I'm bored with the story. Today wasn't that good of a day.." etc. Eventually, it dumps the things distracting you, and after five minutes I'm typically back into writing my actual work. Creative endeavors/procrastination has always been interesting to me, as I haven't had an issue dumping 90-120 hours into different employers, but have the issue with my own writing. This is also a tool used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in various forms of use, namely, sleep. If you can't sleep at night, sometimes you need to dump everything in your brain on paper (which many times turns into a huge to-do list).
kiddz 10y ago
Maybe those who write are fond of seeing themselves differently so they say that writers are different.
- veddox 10y ago
  Just about every group of people does that (including programmers). Belonging to a group is one of the basic desires of every human, and one easy way to create a feeling of belonging to one group is to differentiate its members from everyone around.
leot 10y ago
One simple explanation is that procrastination starts as a symptom of breadth-first search behavior (which can look like slow progress, and is slow progress if you have a poor algorithm/memory), and then it gets significantly aggravated by a shame/guilt feedback loop.
searine 10y ago
>Like most writers Projecting much? I am, and know tons of writers and few are procrastinators, so from the start I find this idea goofy at best.
cableshaft 10y ago
Someone needs to make a writing editor that disguises itself as forum threads, because I can write paragraphs off the cuff in response to Reddit and Hacker News no problem, but when I sit down to a blank editor I ...well it's hard to even sit at the blank editor to begin with, but it takes a lot of effort to get going. If it weren't for Nanowrimo and being reminded consistently to participate in a short story anthology every year, I'd be a writer who didn't write (except comments on HN/Reddit).
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  I admit, this made me laugh. Problem is that information snacks like news and forums are the intellectual equivalent of vending machine junk food. We know it's better for us to cook our own food but we get lazy. Same with forum posts. We feel like we're actually doing something when we're not.
  - pc86 10y ago
    Does anyone actually feel like they're being productive on HN? I mean I'm taking time out of my work day to write this. There are plenty of things I could be doing otherwise, and fully 100% of them are better than writing this comment.
    - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
      >Does anyone actually feel like they're being productive on HN? Mostly no, but sometimes yes. I've not found a more thought provoking place of discourse than HN, and have been referred to a number of good books on here.
  - tkt 10y ago
    I like that term 'information snacks'! That's an excellent descriptor.
  - projektir 10y ago
    Can't really agree with you there. There are comments that are superior to the article they're responding to. There are books that are better off not being read at all. Forums also serve a few purposes that raw reading material cannot. I think moralizing the activity brings with it the peril that you may start feeling good about consuming information the "right" way, and feel bad about consuming it the "wrong" way, while what you should really care about is the information itself. How you get it doesn't really matter. Granted, I don't see anything particularly virtuous or advantageous about cooking your own food, either, so perhaps we're at an impasse...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
wjoe 10y ago
Hardly unique to writers, I've had much of the same issues with procrastination when working on personal programming projects. Much as they describe writer's fear of writing a bad novel, I give up when I think no one will want to use the app I'm working on, I think the project be too difficult to finish, or I'm worried about letting people see my badly written code. Obviously there are some differences - there's a more specific barrier to making software that is functional serves it's intended purpose, compared to a story that might be badly written. But I think "I'm working on an app" may be our generation's version of the "I'm writing a novel" cliche
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cJ0th 10y ago
My thesis is that procrastination comes from cognitive dissonances. And that's the reason, why I don't understand these articles. They make a "science" out of something rather simple. The reason I (as a hobbyist) "can't" write a book or finish a piece of music is that I have ridiculously high, idealistic standards when it comes to producing a work of art. I much rather produce nothing than something mediocre. I don't even feel bad about it. I embrace fatalism in this area. If I don't produce anything worthwhile, so be it. I can't help it but start one musical project after the other. On rare occasions I've got the feeling I am onto something. In that case finishing is no problem. It could turn out that nobody likes what I do but in that case it doesn't matter because I absolutely feel that I did the right thing. On the other hand, there are professionals: people who create for a living. (I am not talking about extraordinary people like J.K Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien but people who have to work every day just to fulfill a need of the market) If you decide to go this route then idealistic thinking is (mostly) out of the question. If I had to write a pop song or light fiction I'd just do it. All that is required is knowing the basics of your craft and top down planning and then you just work through the list like a maniac. It may be hard work but it's easy to do because there are no contradictions. It's like knowing that you have to walk 10k to get back home. That may be inconvenient but you quickly realize that you have to do it and then you simply do it.
- lifeformed 10y ago
  Nobody starts out creating things that meet their idealistic standards. The only people that create such wonderful things are the people that trudged through that period where they knew they were making crap, but kept going.
- llamaz 10y ago
  you can't trivialise procrastination. Multiple books have been written on the subject, many of which go into the details of biology and economic theory.
CM30 10y ago
The point about being too worried about writing something that isn't good is likely why I write about half of what I should be writing. Because every time I consider it done, I go back through the article, reword the intro, change a bunch of sentences that don't sound right this time around and still keep thinking "no, this is nowhere near as good as it could be". I don't believe talent is innate or anything like that (which seems to be the main assumption in the article, that people who procrastinate believed skill is fixed). I believe full well anyone can become a better writer. It's just my ambition is probably higher than my actual skill level, and I simply can't accept anything I don't see as 'perfect'. So I get stressed, take a break to do something else, get stressed even more and only get the determination to finish on some random day when I feel like finishing everything. On another note, I wonder how much worse this 'imposter syndrome' and 'perfectionism' has become with the move to CMS systems like WordPress? Because if you install certain plugins for those scripts (like Yoast), it grades everything you write according to a Flesch–Kincaid readability test. As a result, I find it's very easy to get distracted and worried by the giant warning saying 'improvement required' and end up focusing more on that than what you're actually supposed to be writing about. Makes me wonder how many writers have been left paralysed with the fear their work isn't 'good enough' simply because of the script they use to write their work in...
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
I _want_ to write, but what stops me is: 1) I may not like what I write even though I _know_ I won't be any good at the start (or ever). 2) Although I know the style I want to write in and read that style a lot, I can't think of a good plot and so I convince myself that I need to do this before even beginning to write. If that makes _any_ sense at all.
icc97 10y ago
Reminds me of this TED talk about 'Grit' by Angela Lee [1] [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance?language=en
sambobeckingham 10y ago
I think this article would have been a lot better had it had no content.
emodendroket 10y ago
Well, I feel like I could write the same thing except swap "writers" for a different profession and then swap "English" for a different school subject. Engineers are inveterate procrastinators because they easily did well in math. Politicians, because they did great in social studies. And so on.
ctdonath 10y ago
"I love deadlines. I love the swooshing sound they make as they go by." - Douglas Adams
JohaRiz 10y ago
One of my favorite recent fantasy series is Kingkiller Chronicle, but its author is notorious for procrastinating. It sucks because his books are so beloved by the community, but he spends a ton of his time committing to other projects like his podcast and video series, without ever providing any updates on the status of his writing. It's like having a loved one missing and never knowing their whereabouts.
waspleg 10y ago
This is a great article thanks for posting it. My SO, in her not-day-job is a writer and stand up comic. She has set a self imposed 100 word minimum per day and has been going over 3 months now in an attempt to combat this type of procrastination. It seems to not only be working for her but people who read about what she's doing have also been motivated (but not me, and it's past my bed time ;)) to work on their own projects whatever they may be.

163 points by agarden 10y ago

Jimmy 10y ago

Dear God, please don't inflate their egos further...

Compare Robert Hanks, "On Putting Things Off" http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/robert-hanks/on-putting-things-off http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/robert-hanks/on-putting-things-...

vanillajs 10y ago

you were 'too good' in english class? so what you're saying is you were proabably garbage at math?

projektir 10y ago

I'm getting a strong impression that the article wanted to talk about hard work, growth mindset, and participation trophies, and not actually analyze why writers put off writing. I believe things like this can only be properly understood through empathy, and all the talk about millennials and hard work and procrastination, being blame behavior, is already putting one in the wrong mindset. Perhaps the author should try writing some heavy books, herself.

jkot 10y ago

In my experience most writers are paid by word, and write very fast. Most content writers at Upwork seems to have very little procrastination.. In other terms, image as coder you are paid by number of lines you produce. And there is no compiler, no unit tests...

frandroid 10y ago
If the managers call it "content", it's yeoman's work, and you're not going to get a lot of good writing in; the writers will phone it in. Also, the longer the writing project, the more potential for procrastination. 1000 word articles are easier to wrap up than 10,000 features or books...
6stringmerc 10y ago
It's staggering to me how practice on a keyboard has transitioned to very, very fast train of thought typing. Compared to "thoughtful" writing - such as a fiction piece - it's easily 3 or 4 times faster.

kdamken 10y ago

Don't worry about what this article talks about. If you're a writer, or an artist, or a musician, etc and are having trouble getting things done, the solution is as simple as this: Set a time slot everyday where you will sit down and do nothing but work on creating your art. Doesn't matter if it's good or bad, your only job is to sit there and create for the whole time period. That's the key, is consistently trying to do it. I highly recommend reading the The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, he goes into this a lot more - https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1936891026/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1... He also talks about the concept of "Resistance", which is basically a force of nature that's works against you getting things done, and that gets stronger the closer you are towards doing work that is meaningful to you.

ggambetta 10y ago
Yep, I agree with this. I wrote my first novel during my daily commute (40 minutes each way), and part of the trick was getting into the habit of opening my laptop as soon as I sat down. I also discovered a lot about writer's block. I wrote about the whole thing here: https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-novel-during-my-daily-commute-e1d02c9447b9 https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-nov... (the companion article about the open source pipeline to get it published was discussed in HN earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311200)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- littleweep 10y ago
  Very interesting! Would love to see your Dan Brown novel scene breakdown spreadsheet out of curiosity if you were open to sharing it.
salemh 10y ago
I'm an amateur writer / hobbyist. Having had a decade+ practice of this back-and-forth procrastination with my writing, I'd add "blank page" to War of Art and your excellent comment. "Blank Page" refers to having a separate notebook, or open document page on your computer, that you write why you don't want to write, during your time period. If I don't want to write, I write that: "I don't feel like writing today. It's not going to mean anything, or I'm bored with the story. Today wasn't that good of a day.." etc. Eventually, it dumps the things distracting you, and after five minutes I'm typically back into writing my actual work. Creative endeavors/procrastination has always been interesting to me, as I haven't had an issue dumping 90-120 hours into different employers, but have the issue with my own writing. This is also a tool used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in various forms of use, namely, sleep. If you can't sleep at night, sometimes you need to dump everything in your brain on paper (which many times turns into a huge to-do list).

kiddz 10y ago

Maybe those who write are fond of seeing themselves differently so they say that writers are different.

veddox 10y ago
Just about every group of people does that (including programmers). Belonging to a group is one of the basic desires of every human, and one easy way to create a feeling of belonging to one group is to differentiate its members from everyone around.

leot 10y ago

One simple explanation is that procrastination starts as a symptom of breadth-first search behavior (which can look like slow progress, and is slow progress if you have a poor algorithm/memory), and then it gets significantly aggravated by a shame/guilt feedback loop.

searine 10y ago

>Like most writers Projecting much? I am, and know tons of writers and few are procrastinators, so from the start I find this idea goofy at best.

cableshaft 10y ago

Someone needs to make a writing editor that disguises itself as forum threads, because I can write paragraphs off the cuff in response to Reddit and Hacker News no problem, but when I sit down to a blank editor I ...well it's hard to even sit at the blank editor to begin with, but it takes a lot of effort to get going. If it weren't for Nanowrimo and being reminded consistently to participate in a short story anthology every year, I'd be a writer who didn't write (except comments on HN/Reddit).

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
I admit, this made me laugh. Problem is that information snacks like news and forums are the intellectual equivalent of vending machine junk food. We know it's better for us to cook our own food but we get lazy. Same with forum posts. We feel like we're actually doing something when we're not.
- pc86 10y ago
  Does anyone actually feel like they're being productive on HN? I mean I'm taking time out of my work day to write this. There are plenty of things I could be doing otherwise, and fully 100% of them are better than writing this comment.
  - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    >Does anyone actually feel like they're being productive on HN? Mostly no, but sometimes yes. I've not found a more thought provoking place of discourse than HN, and have been referred to a number of good books on here.
- tkt 10y ago
  I like that term 'information snacks'! That's an excellent descriptor.
- projektir 10y ago
  Can't really agree with you there. There are comments that are superior to the article they're responding to. There are books that are better off not being read at all. Forums also serve a few purposes that raw reading material cannot. I think moralizing the activity brings with it the peril that you may start feeling good about consuming information the "right" way, and feel bad about consuming it the "wrong" way, while what you should really care about is the information itself. How you get it doesn't really matter. Granted, I don't see anything particularly virtuous or advantageous about cooking your own food, either, so perhaps we're at an impasse...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

wjoe 10y ago

Hardly unique to writers, I've had much of the same issues with procrastination when working on personal programming projects. Much as they describe writer's fear of writing a bad novel, I give up when I think no one will want to use the app I'm working on, I think the project be too difficult to finish, or I'm worried about letting people see my badly written code. Obviously there are some differences - there's a more specific barrier to making software that is functional serves it's intended purpose, compared to a story that might be badly written. But I think "I'm working on an app" may be our generation's version of the "I'm writing a novel" cliche

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

cJ0th 10y ago

My thesis is that procrastination comes from cognitive dissonances. And that's the reason, why I don't understand these articles. They make a "science" out of something rather simple. The reason I (as a hobbyist) "can't" write a book or finish a piece of music is that I have ridiculously high, idealistic standards when it comes to producing a work of art. I much rather produce nothing than something mediocre. I don't even feel bad about it. I embrace fatalism in this area. If I don't produce anything worthwhile, so be it. I can't help it but start one musical project after the other. On rare occasions I've got the feeling I am onto something. In that case finishing is no problem. It could turn out that nobody likes what I do but in that case it doesn't matter because I absolutely feel that I did the right thing. On the other hand, there are professionals: people who create for a living. (I am not talking about extraordinary people like J.K Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien but people who have to work every day just to fulfill a need of the market) If you decide to go this route then idealistic thinking is (mostly) out of the question. If I had to write a pop song or light fiction I'd just do it. All that is required is knowing the basics of your craft and top down planning and then you just work through the list like a maniac. It may be hard work but it's easy to do because there are no contradictions. It's like knowing that you have to walk 10k to get back home. That may be inconvenient but you quickly realize that you have to do it and then you simply do it.

lifeformed 10y ago
Nobody starts out creating things that meet their idealistic standards. The only people that create such wonderful things are the people that trudged through that period where they knew they were making crap, but kept going.
llamaz 10y ago
you can't trivialise procrastination. Multiple books have been written on the subject, many of which go into the details of biology and economic theory.

CM30 10y ago

The point about being too worried about writing something that isn't good is likely why I write about half of what I should be writing. Because every time I consider it done, I go back through the article, reword the intro, change a bunch of sentences that don't sound right this time around and still keep thinking "no, this is nowhere near as good as it could be". I don't believe talent is innate or anything like that (which seems to be the main assumption in the article, that people who procrastinate believed skill is fixed). I believe full well anyone can become a better writer. It's just my ambition is probably higher than my actual skill level, and I simply can't accept anything I don't see as 'perfect'. So I get stressed, take a break to do something else, get stressed even more and only get the determination to finish on some random day when I feel like finishing everything. On another note, I wonder how much worse this 'imposter syndrome' and 'perfectionism' has become with the move to CMS systems like WordPress? Because if you install certain plugins for those scripts (like Yoast), it grades everything you write according to a Flesch–Kincaid readability test. As a result, I find it's very easy to get distracted and worried by the giant warning saying 'improvement required' and end up focusing more on that than what you're actually supposed to be writing about. Makes me wonder how many writers have been left paralysed with the fear their work isn't 'good enough' simply because of the script they use to write their work in...

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

I _want_ to write, but what stops me is: 1) I may not like what I write even though I _know_ I won't be any good at the start (or ever). 2) Although I know the style I want to write in and read that style a lot, I can't think of a good plot and so I convince myself that I need to do this before even beginning to write. If that makes _any_ sense at all.

icc97 10y ago

Reminds me of this TED talk about 'Grit' by Angela Lee [1] [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance?language=en

sambobeckingham 10y ago

I think this article would have been a lot better had it had no content.

emodendroket 10y ago

Well, I feel like I could write the same thing except swap "writers" for a different profession and then swap "English" for a different school subject. Engineers are inveterate procrastinators because they easily did well in math. Politicians, because they did great in social studies. And so on.

ctdonath 10y ago

"I love deadlines. I love the swooshing sound they make as they go by." - Douglas Adams

JohaRiz 10y ago

One of my favorite recent fantasy series is Kingkiller Chronicle, but its author is notorious for procrastinating. It sucks because his books are so beloved by the community, but he spends a ton of his time committing to other projects like his podcast and video series, without ever providing any updates on the status of his writing. It's like having a loved one missing and never knowing their whereabouts.

waspleg 10y ago

This is a great article thanks for posting it. My SO, in her not-day-job is a writer and stand up comic. She has set a self imposed 100 word minimum per day and has been going over 3 months now in an attempt to combat this type of procrastination. It seems to not only be working for her but people who read about what she's doing have also been motivated (but not me, and it's past my bed time ;)) to work on their own projects whatever they may be.