Procrastinating like a boss

[oloriel]

While I'm sitting here procrastinating starting on my Silm40 War of Wrath art, lemme share another amusing (well, I thought it was amusing) bit from Tolkien's biography.

Sooo he's in his 70s now and retired and unexpectedly wealthy and people are willing to publish pretty much anything with his name on it so his chances of having the Silmarillion printed are pretty good. That means he's got to get 50 years worth of early drafts and disjointed tales and vagueish outlines and experimental family trees, plus the characters he randomly introduced in The Lord of the Rings (like who is this Galadriel woman? NOBODY KNOWS SHE WAS JUST SUDDENLY THERE) in some kind of working order. Basically it's a shitload of work and he really wants to get a crack on it because it's his life's dream and he knows he's running out of time and he sits in his study/garage and...
plays game after game of Patience* and does no writing whatsoever.

That's so... relatable? I mean, I'm willing to bet that everyone reading this has, at some point, put off writing something - be it creative or academic or work-related (or all of the above, if you're lucky?) - and put it off in order to do something completely different. Be it playing round after round of Solitaire or Minesweeper or some more elaborate computer game, or just obsessively checking e-mails or social media. (That's another thing Tolkien apparently kept on doing, searching for some early draft and instead picking up some piece of fan mail and answering at length.) Right? We've all done that. You might be doing it right now, reading your f-list instead of doing whatever you should be doing.

But I love that detail not because I can connect to it on a personal level, but above all because it shows that, yet again, it's not Young People These Days and it's not Those Damn Smartphones And Computers. It's just people, perhaps creative people in particular but it might just be people in general. When they had no digital means of playing Solitaire, they used actual physical cards. Before cards, they probably used dice or sheep knuckles or tesserae or whatever. Cicero's shitload of letters to Atticus are probably the ancient Roman way of obsessively checking your e-mails. It's just human nature and maybe we should just accept that instead of beating ourselves up over it.

(I mean, the Silmarillion did get published eventually. Somehow. Well, four years after the author's death and only due to the heroic efforts of his youngest son but whatev.)

(FWIW, I did rework my fail!sketches from back in March and am now a bit more hopeful that I might actually be able to pull it off. So there. I've totally earned myself a round of procrastination. UPDATE DAMN YOU. :P)

---
*Solitaire, for those of you outside Europe or younger than 25.

Comments

[heartofoshun]

I totally agree with you. My ex-husband's stepfather was an author. Made a living writing his entire life--had dozens of books published and countless articles. He had a list of procrastination activities he pursued with a vengeance also. He cooked wonderful meals at least twice daily. He gardened and puttered around the house. He kept wonderful scrapbooks of their travels (they traveled a lot)--he included not just the usual photos, but everything else (arranged beautifully) from hotel bills, to postcards, to labels off wine bottles, etc., etc. He also played Solitaire--locked in his study, so he would not be disturbed--for hours on end. This was all pre-internet--I bet he would have been a champion web-cruiser. He also wrote wonderful personal letters, long, detailed, and beautifully written.

He always said procrastination is an art! Contrary to online writing advice blogs, he never suggested that cranking out X,000 words a day every day without fail was the key to productivity or good writing, but instead claimed all of his extraneous activities were a critical part of his creative process. He said, without those, sitting down to write was like starting a car-trip with an empty gas tank.

[independence1776]

It's wholely relatable! So says the woman who is going, "I can get work done at writing group tonight. I don't need to write earlier." Writing group is usually talking group…

On the other hand, it makes me sad because what if?

I am doing better at trying to accept procrastinating, though. I just do it too often to think it can have any benefit. That old saying about "something that can get done at anytime won't be done." >.

[la_samtyr]

That makes a lot of sense.

But at the same time, I always wondered if loss of his wife played a big part of why he just seemed to stop like that.

[oloriel]

This is actually the early 60s, several years before Edith's death, just after his retirement. Mind you, he's not exactly stopping (he's just not being terribly productive because he's just shifting more stuff around and reworking yet another family tree instead of sticking things together - but that must have been a daunting task at that point! I don't know how Christopher ever managed to do it), just "wasting time" a lot. ^^

[oloriel]

I'd certainly be a lot more productive without procrastination, but I do know I wouldn't necessarily be more efficient. Well, I'd obviously have a cleaner house if I spent less time on the computer and more time cleaning stuff! Would I be happier though? Big no. But in writing, a lot of work is actually done while my hands and/or body are doing other things, and I'll typically come up with solutions to things that have me stumped not while actually working at the document, but while showering or gardening or, yes, playing Solitaire. It's probably also no coincidence that I occasionally have three-year breaks in between chapters; I'm burnt out on the story (for lack of a better description) and don't know how to go ahead, but once the distance has grown big enough, I may think of a way out that was simply invisible earlier.

So I definitely think it has benefits. The key is, of course, controlling it rather than being controlled by it. It would be more fruitful to learn that (and ~harness the power of procrastination~!) instead of trying to avoid it altogether, I guess.

[oloriel]

Wise words from a wise man! Humphrey Carpenter ventured something along the lines of Tolkien could easily have finished the Silmarillion "if only he could have disciplined himself into adopting regular working methods", but I can't help thinking that the Silmarillion would never have gotten as far as it got if Tolkien had been able to adopt regular working methods. If he'd "disciplined himself" he'd just have prepared his regular lectures and written all those textbooks on Anglo-Saxon and the concept of treason in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's analogues that he should have been working on in the first place!

(My mother does travelogue scrapbooks like that and they're such a joy to look at, even decades later! I'm OK with writing travelogue texts but I have no particular talent for collage so I collect all our ticket stubs and restaurant bills and exhibition pamphlets in vain...)
Something usually gets done while something else should be done, though, so it evens out in the end. And in the meantime, thoughts are going to get sorted and the first scenes and scraps of dialogues will take shape. The trick is just catching them and pinning them down before something more interesting comes along! ;)

[independence1776]

With me, I can tell when I'm procrastinating versus letting something simmer. One is active avoidance and the latter is patience (though that doesn't sound quite right). I'm procrastinating right now on adding something to my Darkest Night story but letting my compilation simmer; I've already solved one problem with the latter. But in general, procrastination is controlling me so I need relearn discipline in order to reverse that.

Basically, I'm agreeing that idle times aren't a problem (showers are wonderful, wonderful things for working story issues out), but for me there's a difference between idle/fallow times and procrastination. And the latter is a problem for me.

[la_samtyr]

Maybe he was just overwhelmed by it all? I can only imagine sort through all of it and working it into a timeline.

[oloriel]

I expect he was. I remember going through all the published material (including the HoME) for the Silm Re-read three years ago and that was often overwhelming - and it had already been brought into some kind of order! Having all the loose sheets and notebooks and letters would be daunting anyone into procrastination. Especially if the job you enjoy is making stuff up - pardon me, discovering the history ;) - rather than sorting previously written material. I would definitely have taken refuge in a card game too!

[oloriel]

It certainly can be a problem. But it's still human. (As, of course, is learning how to deal with it. *hugs*)

[hrymfaxe]

YAY silm40!art from you!!! :D

I can totally relate to getting ideas for how to move forward with anything creative while not doing the creative thing. Going for a walk, in the shower, etc. If I resort to cleaning instead of doing the creative thing, then I know it is not positive procrastination, but active avoidance, lol!

[hrymfaxe]

I love this story about your ex-husband's stepfather! And it rings very true to me. Any pursuit in life drains me, if that is all I do, so happy procrastination habits are like putting fuel in the tank. :D

[oloriel]

And from you! \o/ Exciting times!

Hah! Good point. That's how you notice you're really displacing your work. XD