Writer's block, an owner's guide: Structured procrastination
I said I was back from vacation. If you thought that meant I was gonna be writing a large number of deep essays here that would transform your life, yeah, well, I hoped that too.
But for the next few weeks I need to spend a lot of my time reviewing everything I know about psychotherapy (for a reason we’ll talk about afterwards) and most of it’s not relevant to writer’s block. So writing Today I Write takes a lower place in My Priorities.
And that possibly means I will give it more attention than usual.
Does that surprise you? I’ve noticed that I very often spend my time and energy on the second-most-important thing I should be doing. So one way to get myself to do something - like writing - is to make sure I have something else more important to do. Right now, I’m writing because I should be asleep in bed.
John Perry noticed the same thing I did and he has some sensible advice on dealing with it. So if what I just said makes sense in your life too, read his notes on Structured Procrastination.
If it doesn’t make sense in your life, go look around this site for other ideas that do. When it comes to dealing with writer’s block a lot of things are true that (seem to) contradict each other.
The psychology of motivation is like that. One day, when there’s time, I’ll think about the contradictions and some other day the answer, the connection among all of them, will come to me out of nowhere, as answers do when you let things simmer (and that’s a whole other area of creative experience that we haven’t looked at for a while).
Published on May 25, 2005 at 1:45 am. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/structured-procrastination.html
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