procrastination
Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.
“Geoff Dyer’s ten rules for writing fiction,” Paris Review Tumblr, August 17, 2013.
The daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists—people who really do get a lot done—very rarely include techniques for “getting motivated” or “feeling inspired.” Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasize the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishing certain physical actions, regardless of mood. Anthony Trollope wrote for three hours each morning before leaving to go to his job as an executive at the post office; if he finished a novel within a three-hour period, he simply moved on to the next. (He wrote forty-seven novels over the course of his life.) The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasize specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. “Inspiration is for amateurs,” the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2012), 69.