More About the Writing Process

 When I was younger, and not necessarily all that younger than my current 61 years, I had a problem with procrastination. Now Amy Sackville proposes What If Procrastination Is an Essential Part of Our Writing Process?

...To some extent, I do actually believe in this as a process. I can’t write out of repose. I need a state of susceptibility, of charge; the procrastination is a way to cultivate or induce that state. In such a state—restless, antsy—sometimes I stand up and go to my laptop, or turn to a different notebook, a new page, and write something on the sly; it’s done like a trick while I’m not looking, a note in the margins. The writing is done in these snatches—the beginnings of something new appear this way. I think this bears some investigation because it is doing the thing, at least some part of it. The hidden part.

Ms. Sackville does not quite have a conclusion, but maybe she has a point:

4 pm. I know I have one more day on the deadline and that’s one more day that this article exists in a state of preparation. I can’t find a structure. I want to say that this is an affliction and it causes pain; I also want to think that the mulch might be generative. That this activity does, in itself, have value and meaning; that it is a way to resist the tyranny of “productivity,” because an end product is not the point, and I think writing is made that way.

I know that at my age I do not have much, if any time, left for procrastination!