A Writer’s Guide to Overcoming Procrastination for Good with 3 Game-Changing Strategies
Procrastination can be a two-faced monster if you don’t recognise the decisions you make because they are painless while running on autopilot, and are not motivated to do anything to fix them. You can call every challenging day a break day or turn an obstacle into a rest day and let your rest days continue for weeks, or you can take stock of your situation and take action to fix whatever is bothering you from participating in the process of creating. It gives you the illusion that you might be productive because you’re actually getting some rest after all.
You can be someone who loves showing up for their goals, or you can be someone who never does and blames it on your procrastination habit.
It’ll not help you if you don’t stop giving in to the urge to do whatever you’re doing or not doing from taking action on your goals.
Actions manifest things into reality. Staying still doesn’t do anything but keep you in your comfort zone.
Even if you fail at things, it’s okay because you’re taking action.
You don’t have to be perfect. You just need to get things done.
Done is better than perfection
That’s a new mantra I’ve been chanting in my head lately. I’ll make an astrological house chart joke to go along with it. I’m what you may call a Virgo rising, and I prefer perfection in mundane things, like spelling words correctly in the texts I send to my friends. If I’m okay with putting that kind of pressure when texting someone, you can imagine what kind of a person I am when it comes to my profession: writing online.
Let me tell you, before I cut myself some slack, I used to edit my chapters thrice before posting them on fiction apps, where readers hoped that I posted daily. And they also wished that I posted longer chapters every day.
Me being the doe-eyed moron that I am, I tried to do things as they wished and hoped and also tried my best to write longer chapters every day to make them happy at the expense of my mental health and well-being.
It was a sure-shot way to lead me to burnout, and it did.
Now, I try to stick to getting words down on Google Docs and just editing my work only twice. It might not seem like an enormous change to you, but it has been quite a bit of a mindset shift for me.
Allowing yourself to rest but letting yourself respect your deadlines
I’m all about giving myself enough time to rest, but I also have a habit of letting myself go when I get overwhelmed while doing hard things. Letting myself go in this situation means throwing in the towel, closing my computer’s top, lying in my bed, turning on Netflix, and calling it a day. If there are snacks ready to be accessed by my side, the whole letting myself go thing gets a lot easier, and I can spend hours at a time watching a new show if I don’t have to go anywhere or do something.
But the shift I have made in my thinking lately is to know when I start to feel antsy again to create and not to worry about the 900 thousand different things when I’m actually letting myself go and binging a good show on Netflix.
Everything can wait while I try to enjoy my life where I am. Being present while watching television is important, too.
When it’s time to create and write the next story, I respect my urge to create and show up in front of my computer screen and write.
You might not know what’s going to happen next in your story, but all you have to do is write the next scene
Whenever I start to lay the foundations of a new book, it feels like a mammoth task to begin writing it. At first, I used to get overwhelmed and start plotting the book out on paper to get rid of the anxiety of beginning a new book, and then I realised that I would never use the plotting draft I had created when I was actually writing the book. It was because, after a lot of trial and error, I found out that I was a pantser. I only enjoy writing books when I don’t know what’s about to show up next on the page, and plotting the books before I started them took away that will to create for me.
After writing books for almost a decade and with a lot of experimentation when it comes to practising the craft, I have learnt one minor detail that’s crucial to keep writing longer-length books, especially if you are a discovery writer.
You have to show up and write the next scene.
Don’t try to figure out the entire book in one go. And you don’t need to plot in greater detail before you start a book, either.
Take benefit of my lazy approach to storytelling and writing longer books.
Just imagine your characters wherever they are in your book, no matter what part of the story it is, where you find yourself stuck, the beginning, the middle, or the climax, and try to imagine what the characters will be doing in the next scene.
Now, write whatever you see down.
Come back the next day and do this process all over again.
If you write 1000 words every day, perhaps in two and a half months, you’ll have a full-length book.
Don’t write a book for more than three months if you are applying this approach since there’s a good chance you will burn out.
Write your book, take a break, and revisit this method again to write your next book. Then, the next. And the next one.
Conclusion
If you stick to what you can do and know your limitations, you might be able to argue what’s not working for you and fix it.
I hope some of what I have written here is helpful to you.
If you’d like to read my ongoing serialised fiction book, click here: https://radish.app.link/LSKQ09yJNEb
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