Procrastination, Avoidance, & How to Get Back on the Page
Or, How I'm Training Myself to Have Better Writing Habits
That poem/story/book ain’t gonna write itself.
But I wish it could. I can avoid sitting down to write with the best of them. This habit I have bothers the hell out of me. One thing I’ve witnessed again and again is people who consistently produce consistently set time to write. First drafts, second drafts, thirtieth drafts: Bottom line is, they consistently show up to put in the work.
I am not good at this. I’m busy. I juggle caring for an aging mother and running my own household. It’s a lot. I squeeze in writing when I can. But it’s not enough for me. I have writing goals. My 2024 goal is to finish my linked flash fiction collection of stories based in the Ozarks, where I live. I’m making progress. But it’s been slow going.
One of my reading obsessions is neuroscience. Last month, I found a book on how our brains work in forming habits. The habit itself can be “good” or “bad.” I was curious to learn how we form habits and how I can use what I’ve learned to create habits that serve me better.
The book I read is “Good Habits, Bad Habits” by Wendy Wood, PhD (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2019). Dr Wood spells it out in layman’s terms. In the simplest sense, a habit is something we do without even thinking. Like brushing our teeth every morning. Reaching for our favorite coffee cup and turning on the morning news. Making our bed.
These habits we just do can be positive or they can be negative. Going for a run every morning before work. Having a salad for lunch every day. Lighting a cigarette. Buying a candy bar every afternoon. What makes these habits is we do them without thinking. These behaviors have become so ingrained in us we just do them.
But we can retrain our brains to change and replace habits that are not serving us. Yes, it is work. It requires active decision making time and time again, maybe for a month, maybe for a year, until that action becomes habit.
So last month, I made a commitment to avoid Twitter/X/I still don’t know what to call it. Now, I love Twitter/X. It’s where my people are. It’s where I get to read others’ writing that inspires and thrills me. But I also have a bad habit of using it to avoid writing.
Along with avoiding Twitter/X for the month of April, I also scheduled 45 minutes/day Monday through Friday in my calendar to write. Why 45 minutes a day? Because I knew that was doable for me. Not too long that I would quickly find it a chore and even more quickly find a way to avoid sticking to my schedule. And in 45 minutes, I can actually achieve a first draft of a flash story or make serious headway into revising a flash.
And it’s been a success! Yes, I have missed some writing sessions for one reason or another. But I have met those writing session appointments with myself 75% of the time this month. And by coming to the page five days a week (mostly!), I am finding it easier to continue where I left off from the day before, and the times I stare at the screen in absolute bewilderment have lessened.
It’s not a habit yet. Far from it. That’s why I now have my calendar set through summer to show up Monday through Friday. If I need to set that calendar through all of 2024 or beyond, I will do it. I will do it until writing every weekday is a habit, is something I simply do. Like brushing my teeth and making my bed.
And the garden is starting to come to life!
Here’s the beginnings of the greenhouse. Peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers are planted. They’re tiny little babies right now. But wait until my next newsletter. Oh, how they’ll be growing!
And here are our raised garden beds. I’m still cleaning out most of them. Then we’ll add a new layer of dirt from down at our creek (full of nutrients) before planting. Just like in a field, you want to alternate your plants each year. So where the tomatoes were last year, this year will be green beans. Squash will now be where the green beans were last year. Since we add new creek bed dirt to these raised beds each year, we don’t have to let them go fallow for a season. We simply alternate what grows in them.
And for fun, if you look off into the area past the beds, you’ll see the new fruit trees (bottom trunks wrapped in white) we planted several weeks ago. Apples and peaches!
And for extra fun, the birdhouse in the middle of the picture is designed for bluebirds. But a chickadee is squatting in it! We’re pretty sure she has eggs in there, so we’re now anxiously waiting for chickadee babies to appear.
Since we live on a mountain plateau, we have a lot of rocks. We collect the cool ones we find on our walks. The top left is Mozarkite (the Missouri state rock), and it’s only found in the area of the Ozarks I live in. The top right rock is actually fossilized coral (pretty cool stuff from those days when this land was an ocean). That beautiful reddish brown one is iron ore. The others, I have no clue. I just thought they were beautiful.
And finally, our faithful old Lab, Shadow. She will be 15 in July. She is almost 100% deaf at this point. Her eyesight is not good. But that nose of hers still works, and she loves nothing more than going out with me, soaking up the sun and fresh air, and sniffing all the glorious smells. I think she’ll make it to 15. We’re already planning her party.
For your reading pleasure, Patricia Q. Bidar has a new novelette out with ELJ Editions, called Wild Plums. I highly recommend! You can purchase it on Amazon HERE
And I can’t believe I’ve never read Noy Holland until now. An absolute genius of a writer. I stumbled across her story collection What begins with bird, and I’m so glad I did. Her ability to render dark family relationships in evocative language is something to be studied. It’s only available via e-book, and you can buy it HERE through the publisher, Dzanc Books.
I published one flash this month, in the wonderful Black Fork Review. You can read it HERE
Until next time! In the meantime, keep living. Keep reading. Keep writing.