If there’s one thing that I think that the American education system teaches students well, it’s how to procrastinate. As students stumble from one deadline to the next, the brain rewards itself for procrastination regardless of the outcome.
If you procrastinate until the last moment (however you may define “last moment”) to do something and you fail, well, what did you expect? You didn’t have enough time. If you had had more time, you could have done so much better on the test, on the paper, on whatever. It doesn’t matter how much time you had overall, because you were busy doing other stuff (that was probably also waiting until the last moment). Your brain rewards itself by shifting responsibility to the external locus of not having enough time.
If you procrastinate and you succeed, well, that’s because you’re so amazing! You don’t need to work steadily, a little bit every day because you’re just so naturally gifted that you can just turn it on like a lightbulb. Your brain reinforces the practice of procrastination with the dopamine rush of success.
Unfortunately, I don’t see many adults, myself included, growing out of this naturally. It takes effort to change behavior. A lot of effort. So whenever I have a chance to work or speak with young writers, I always try to emphasize the importance of discipline.
I taught a writing class at the middle and high school level. After spending six weeks on the fundamentals, I told the kids that we’d be ending class with twenty minutes of writing time. Except that I didn’t tell them that it would be fifteen minutes, so that we could talk about their word counts.
To the kid who wanted to write novels, I told them that their word count would produce a novel in eight months.
To the kid who wanted to write short stories, I told them that their word count would produce nine short stories a year.
To the kid who only knew they wanted to write, but didn’t know what, I told them that they’d be able to try so many different forms in a year that that they’d find what they wanted to write and probably develop a solid style along the way.
Discipline is something I feel that I’ve struggled with. When I graduated from college at the age of 28, I felt highly motivated to write and publish a novel. I’d written two already; I did not feel confident about the first one, but thought that the second one was pretty decent, though I wanted to move on and write something new. When the idea for Clean Freak came to me, I felt strongly that it would be my first published novel.
However, even with motivation high, it took me about two years to write it, because I would go for long periods of time between bursts of productivity. If I only counted the time I actually spent writing, I probably wrote the book in less than a year. After that, unfortunately, my intrinsic motivation waned and there was no external motivator keeping me going. I didn’t have the discipline to continue without motivation.
So as I am getting back into writing, I am working on my discipline. It’s still a work in progress, which means that I’m not to the point of following my own advice yet, but it’s advice I still give to young writers and myself.
The Chimerical Dark 