I ran across this quote on Twitter this morning. It is from attributed to a playwright named Paul Rudnick. I had never heard of Rudnick nor his most important play Jeffrey. An internet search revealed that he has written 10 plays or musicals, 5 novels, a memoir, book of essays, several screenplays, and 13 articles for The New Yorker. He wrote the screenplays for The Addams Family, Addams Family Values, and The First Wives Club, all of which I have seen. As I have come to fully realize and accept, I simply cannot know everything and everyone of note.
Is writing 90% procrastination?
Procrastinating as much I do, (and mind you, others have noticed this as well), I feel a need to comment on Rudnick’s quote. Is writing 90% procrastination for me? It would be easy to say yes, because at times it seems like all I do is procrastinate.
When there is a deadline, I do what most of my students do and exactly what I did when I was a student. I wait until the last minute and then work furiously to meet the deadline. That is classic postponement and, yes, a lot of procrastination is involved to get me to that last minute.
I have written about procrastination at least twice:
There is a few exceptions to my procrastination. One is when I am writing the AYF Olympics and posting daily articles from Wednesday to Monday over the Labor Day weekend. There is no time for procrastination. I have to be at the various events, take photos, and immediately write articles often beginning at 10 or 11 pm. Circumstances do not allow for any procrastination. It is not a surprise that I, um, blogged about the volume of writing this takes up in September: Chidem Inch: The Olympics.
When I am writing without a deadline, that is another story. It will always look like procrastination and half of the time it is. The other half of the time, I am thinking about what I want to say and how I want to say and organize it before putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard. In this latter case, I am actually working on the piece but dang if it doesn’t look exactly like procrastination simply because nothing is being written
Does this thinking before writing process work?
Again, this is debatable. The answer is a wishy-washy sometimes yes and sometimes no. What does this mean? Sometimes the advanced planning and contemplation produces a winner. Other times not. Whether a piece is gets a lot of views, which in my views determines if it is a winner or not, is more dependent on the topic than how much thought I put into it. Nostalgic memoir blogs, reminiscing about growing up, generally fare better. Sometimes it is just the timing of the piece as it was
If it is a stream of consciousness or esoteric piece, then viewer ship is down. The esoteric piece are written mostly for my benefit. I find myself trying to make sense of something political, something that seems to be confounding to society in general, or some aspect of the business world that is seemingly bone headed. The steam of conscious pieces go from a complete ramble to me just playing around and trying to be clever at the same time. The response is often, “What was that piece all about?” or “Where the hell do you come up with these things?” My answer to both lines of questions is that “Sometimes it is just a blog about nothing.” And again, I have bloggy bits on this very topic:
Oddly, the bloggy bits ranked 2-4 of my posting with the most views were spontaneous. There was almost no time between the idea popping into my head and the creation of the piece. Passion for the subject matter certainly played a role in these pieces.
To sum things up, I do procrastinate and true to the subtitle of this blog, I most definitely muse and meander. And, I am OK with both.
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