procrastination – Page 6 – Deborah Makarios

February 1, 2013

The War of Art

I read it straight through last night.
(That might seem like some kind of feat, but it’s an easy read – so much white space! Interestingly, he doesn’t feel the need to fill his page. Once he’s said what he wants to say on a topic, he stops saying it.)

It’s divided into three sections:
Resistance: defining the enemy
Combating Resistance: turning pro
Beyond Resistance: the higher realm

The first section is concerned with defining the force he calls Resistance, which is the antagonistic force within each of us which tries to stop us doing what we’re supposed to be doing – for writers, writing.

This frequently takes the form of procrastination, but can also disguise itself, he says, as golf, sex, fear, depression and – perhaps most problematic of all – the voice of reason.

To combat this, he says in part two, we turn pro. I wasn’t entirely sure whether he meant literally giving up our jobs for it, but certainly a change of attitude is involved.
If something is your job, you show up, come hell or high water (particularly if you’re not eligible for paid sick leave) and you get it done. You don’t hover nervously wondering if your work (when you eventually produce some) is really good enough compared to others in your field (what if the other plumbers are better than me???)
You don’t go waffling on about how yours “is a high and lonely destiny” either.
You just get on with it.

What stood out to me most was his emphasis on being able to be miserable.
“The Marine Corps teaches you how to be miserable.
“This is invaluable for an artist…
“The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.” (Pressfield, 2002, p.68)

If you wait til writing is the easy option, you will never write.
No excuses.
I got up half an hour early this morning in order to write this. In my own small way (warm dressing gown, hot tea, blue sky outside the window) I am being miserable.
I am sure the Marines could make themselves more miserable with the materials to hand, but hey, I’m not a Marine.
Plus it’ll be miserable enough in here come winter. (For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, New Zealand houses don’t have central heating. Or that much insulation. We just put on more clothes.)

The third section is all about the unseen reality supporting us, which Pressfield peoples with a bewilderingly syncretistic array of beings: angels from the Talmud, the Nine Muses from the Greek pantheon, Krishna from the Bhagavad-Gita, “God” (unspecified), Nature, a good slosh of Jungian psychology and the ancient common ground of dreams and visions.

A bit of a mixed bag, which makes for something of an unfocussed read, but he has some good points to make about doing what we do because it’s what we do, not because we’re comparing ourselves to someone else – what he calls territorial vs hierarchical thinking.

This is a good book to read, albeit not a precisely argued one – you’ll pick up nuggets of useful wisdom in amongst his diatribes on fundamentalists being less evolved humans than artists and how doing what you’re supposed to do in this world can cure cancer (and apparently everything else).

So there you have it, people: just get on with it.

If you’re prepared to make the sacrifices, make them without complaining. If you aren’t, stop wasting your time and give up now.

Disclaimer: no-one gave me a copy to review, nor did I part with my hard-earned for it. I borrowed a copy from the library. You may consider that this makes me a cheapskate who won’t support their fellow artists; I consider that this makes me an unbiased reviewer.

January 23, 2013

The Artist's Way

How many of you have worked through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way?

How many of you have started it and never finished? Judging by that modern confessional, the Internet, quite a few. Well, far be it from me to judge – I only made two weeks.

I didn’t intend to abandon it, but Life Intervened (as it does) and though I carried on with the Morning Pages for a while, eventually I decided I needed the sleep more.

Please understand: giving up half an hour’s sleep of a morning is no laughing matter for a night-owl. This was Sacrifice, and when the fire failed to fall from on high, I hauled my sacrifice back off the altar and went on with life.

Yahwehfire — Elijah never moaned about the early mornings.

But just recently, I had a Good Idea.

(At least, I hope it will turn out to be a Good Idea. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, after all.)

There are twelve weeks in the course of the Artist’s Way.
There are twelve months in the year.

Why not spread out the exercises and so forth over a month, instead of over a week? That way, if Life Intervening causes you to miss one or two Morning Page sessions, well, it’s not the end of the world.

Plus you have more time to think up (and enact) some really epic Artist Dates, should you wish.

The only downside to this plan is the fact that January is mostly dead and gone. (Much longer and I’ll be going through its pockets for loose change.)

But to change perspective: I’ve got just as much time as I would if I was doing it by weeks.

In any case, I’d better get on with it.
Stay tuned for developments – don’t let me weasel out of it again!

Weasel Poupette — The Weasel weaselling out. Don’t be swayed by the pleading little eyes!

January 10, 2013

We have met the enemy

and he is us.

Or more accurately, he is our procrastination.

There is so much we could do – so much we want to do, that we never get around to. Like the apostle Paul, we don’t do what we do want to do, and we do what we don’t.

Housework, for example. How much housework — expressed as a proportion of the whole — is done annually by people who are only doing it to avoid doing something else?

Of course, some of this procrastination is necessary development time for ideas, but sooner or later the idea is sufficiently ripe and must be harvested, or it never becomes anything more.

We want to write.

We love having written.

Sometimes we even enjoy the process of writing, but the actual sitting-down-to, the sacrificing of all the other things we could be doing (no matter how unpleasant) doesn’t appeal. Not close up. From a distance, the allure is strong enough, but by the time opportunity finally arrives, it has palled.

And so we put it off. There’s always another day.

The other enemy (or so we tell ourselves) is time. There simply isn’t enough of it to go around.

In fact, unless you are one of the modern madwomen who attempt to work full time, raise children, keep the house in order, have a social life and a creative life all in the twenty-four hours per day allotted to us ordinary mortals, you probably do have some time. Possibly not much, but some.

If you are one of those women, you have my respect — for your industriousness, if not your sense — but you will never have from me that sincerest form of flattery: imitation.

Ergo, I have some time in my day(s) which I am not using for writing, because I am: using it for something else, wasting it on nothing much, sleeping through it (a popular option) or – and this is the part I have yet to understand – just not writing in it.

Wastage can be minimized, priorities can be rearranged, sleep can be (grudgingly) foregone – but how do you fight the absence of something? How do you fight not-doing? How, in short, do we defeat our own procrastination?

There are multifarious theories as to why we procrastinate, most of which seem to centre around our fear of a) discovering we are enormously talented or b) discovering we aren’t.

So is courage the missing ingredient? Or a ego-defying absence of investment in whether what we do is any good? Or (as with so many things) is it simply a lack of self-discipline that lets us weasel out of sitting down to a task that we may not, at that precise moment, enjoy?

To be honest with you, I am not so much concerned with the psychology of it as with finding out how to beat it.

To that end, this blog; a form of accountability if you will – and only if you will, because as the Caped Gooseberry pointed out, accountability does not work if there is no-one to be accountable to.

In return, I hope to offer you entertainment, encouragement, and whatever I may learn along the way. And should you also be tired of procrastination’s clammy embrace, then by all means, sharpen your pen.