In recent months, some of these entries have gotten slightly more difficult to write. I’m slightly self-conscious about the fiction projects I’m active on, so I’m not quite sure when to share excerpts from them. That might change in the near future, but not just yet.
This week, I had a conversation with one of my students, one who, at times, would prefer to distract themselves1 rather than get going on their work. At a certain point at the end of the day, I said to them, “You think you know about procrastination? I could teach you doctorates in procrastination.”
I talked about their position, how they needed to keep on top of their work because time can slip away from them. Of course, when you’re in your mid to late teens, your perspective on wasting time changes from when you’ve passed a half century of life.
This made me think of something I wrote a few years back as part of my A Writer’s Biography series, an intermittent series of articles over the years that might end up becoming the basis of my memoir, if I ever get around to it. I wrote about this issue of procrastination years back, but looking back at the initial article, I was thinking I might have a few more things to say about the issue now. So, let’s talk about it.
How I See Procrastination Now Compared to Before
I distinctly remember a moment when I was fourteen years old when I was visiting my relatives at my Grandpa and Grandma Sumner’s place on the north side of La Crosse, Wisconsin. I remember it being evening and I was hanging out with several of my cousins outside staring at the nighttime stars and declaring to one of them (I believe it was my cousin Kathy, hi there.) that I would write four books by the time I turned eighteen.
I did not quite reach that lofty goal by my eighteenth birthday. Now past my fiftieth birthday, I have three completed novels and one poetry collection to my name.
Obviously, procrastination had some effect on my production. I mean, I’m not like Harper Lee, but I’m sure as heck not as prolific as several of my literary idols such as Stephen King or Elmore Leonard. Then again, in the latter two cases, they have or had the advantage of securing enough publishing support to be able to live off their writing earnings full-time, which is a very late 20th century phenomenon, as I’ve recently started to sense.
I am someone who tries to avoid falling into stereotyping and bias, but I cannot help but think my generation, Generation X, born in or around the 1970’s, came of age in a transitional era in our country when it came to both culture and technology. We came of age at a time, the 1980’s and 1990’s, where America was arguably at our peak. We stood triumphant over the world, and all of the ugliness that it took for us to get there was buried in classic Westerns or revisionist cinema such as the Rambo series, which promised its audience there was a way to win the Vietnam War even though the entire premise was ridiculous.
We also certainly came of age at a time when we were at the junction between the late industrial age and the information age. We had video games, CD’s, and computer graphics when previous generations had none of the above. We were among the very last college students not to regularly use email and worry about the cost of long distance calls. Often, rather than depending on our parents getting us desktop computers, we relied on the computer labs in the basements of our college dorms. We generally had no cell phones and no real encounters with the Internet except for the odd places to find in the exotic nooks and crannies there.
Despite this, I certainly had my own distractions. There were video games from the Atari 2600 up to Sid Meier’s Civilization for my desktop computer. There was even the Playstations and XBoxes my wife and I bought for our children that I ended up piloting more than a few times. Then there were the movies, the shows, the World Wide Web.
There were years when I didn’t write a single thing, where the tall tales and ideas simply burbled up and down in my perpetual stew of ideas in my head which gathered stories in my head for as long as I could remember. In all seriousness, I didn’t have the perseverance in my younger days to put something together like those stories, to put them on the page. I started and then stopped, like the more than a dozen or so hand-written pages of a long-forgotten story my father found in my parents’ home and returned to me.
In those years I was a younger man, I called myself a writer but did little to forward that vision. This does not mean I didn’t utilize my writing talents, however. I first turned to journalism to make a living with the skills I had, using it to inform my community about what they needed to know. Over time, when the work was fewer and farther between, I entered the education profession and utilized my writing (and other) skills that way. In both professions, I felt I had value, that I had purpose. Away from all of that, I helped build a family, a home. It was a good life. (It still is now, too.)
Then, fifteen years ago, I began to wonder if I couldn’t do something more, whether I could become something more than what I had tried to be before.
It didn’t start immediately. As I have told several of my students, if you don’t consistently dedicate yourself to your goals, there’s no way you will be able to switch on. It took me a while to decide what I wanted to write about, and then to see who might be interested in helping me bring it to life. I also wanted to share what I came up with, so I started to meet with and network with these people. Some good friendships and good advice came from that networking and writing groups.
Finally, in 2019, my first book, The Holy Fool came out. I had no idea what I was doing, and I don’t claim to know everything about what I’m doing now. I know a little bit more, now.
I would love to tell you I never let myself distracted anymore, that I’m just a writing machine. That wouldn’t be totally accurate. I’ve written at least 200,000 words a year for the past four years. I’ve only kept track of my word counts with a good amount of accuracy ever since 2018, but I’m guessing when I got started back into writing earlier in the decade, I was only writing around 50,000-120,000 words per year – pretty pitiful compared to my current output. Setting word count and project goals at the beginning of the year has helped me to achieve something more than I ever expected out of myself.
I think my current attitude about how much time I have left is symbolized by me checking out Bowker Publishing Services. They’re the people where you can buy ISBN numbers from, the numbers used to identify books.
I’m beginning to wonder if 10 or 20 ISBN numbers are going to be enough for everything else I’m planning to write. Probably not more than 20. Well, I’ll make them good ones, then.
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