One thing all the writers I know have in common is an innate ability to procrastinate, particularly when they’re supposed to be writing. Perhaps it has something to do with having an overactive imagination, or maybe it’s because writing is much harder than people think. Then again, it could all be part of the process. By letting our minds wander or flit from one inconsequential thing to another, we may allow the ideas to come to us. Whatever it is, I know I do it a lot. Today, I thought I’d share a few of the odd things that lead me away from my keyboard.
I learned to knit and crochet when I was about six or seven. My mother came from a long line of knitters and crocheters — I may just have to break off here to check out whether that is a real word and what its origins are; then again, that would be procrastinating, so maybe not. I also learned to sew (quite badly) at school. Sometimes I knit, crochet or sew when I really should be writing. More recently I’ve become interested in recycling my old clothes. Partly this is born from necessity (starving artist and all that), but I also believe we should all be doing what we can to avoid waste and conserve natural resources. The trouble is, I can easily spend an hour scrolling through Pinterest, looking at other people’s recycling ideas. My most recent obsession is darning. Not the mend your holey socks kind, the modern ‘visible mending’ kind. Luckily, I have a large stash of oddments of yarn, and as the moths had had a field day with some of my favourite knitwear, it came in quite handy.
The problem is one thing leads to another, and before I knew it, I was needle felting all the little ends I’d cut off from my knitting, crochet and darning work. Needle felting was one of those things I discovered on Pinterest a while ago, so I had all the equipment and a vague idea about what I was doing. The last time I had enough little bits to make a sheet of fabric, I made a rather natty case for my sunglasses and another for my iPad, so it wasn’t entirely a waste of time, but it certainly wasn’t writing. Then I started thinking about other ways to use all those bits of yarn and fell down a rabbit hole — researching spinning techniques, carding, drop spinning and even spinning wheels. I may even have watched a few videos on how to do it. Now, it is possible that in some future work, this knowledge will stand me in good stead. Make Do and Mend was quite the thing in the era I’ve been writing about, and knowing about different techniques could make my writing more authentic. Then again, I may be making excuses.
Another project that took me away from my keyboard recently was soap making. In fairness, I was down to my last bar of soap, but there was no real need to let it eat into my writing time. I’ve been making all our soap for years now. It’s cheaper than buying shop soap, and I enjoy being able to add different essential oils and colours to suit my mood. It’s also another Mend and Make Do project because I save all the little slivers of old soap, cut them up and add them to the new bars. I wrote something about soap making in my current WIP, but that was proper soap making with lye, not cheats melt and pour in the microwave, so my efforts could hardly be called research.
Another of those Mend and Make do projects is my felted sweater blanket. I made one at the end of the winter for Commando in response to the rising cost of gas. The idea was to cosy-up under blankets rather than turn the heating on or light the fire. It takes a surprisingly long time to sew enough squares together to make a blanket, and I’ve abandoned mine for the time being because it’s far too hot to work on it. When it gets colder, it will almost certainly be another thing I do when I’m supposed to be writing.
Obviously, one of the biggest time wasters is social media. No matter how much I tell myself that looking through old photos on various local history Facebook pages is research, the truth is most of the things I look at have no connection to anything I’m writing, and I can spend hours reading things, then researching them when I should be working. The same goes for Twitter. I’m kidding myself when I say I’m looking at other people’s opinions and experiences to give me plot and character ideas. What I’m really doing is wasting time when I should be writing.
That’s not to say I’ve done no useful research on social media or come up with no plot twists. The local history groups have been extremely helpful, and even Twitter is useful for marketing, connecting with other writers and seeing how other people think. Mostly, though, it is another rabbit hole to fall down. It can also lead to some rather unsavoury encounters.
Even bona fide research can turn into procrastination. A quick search to find out the origin of a phrase and make sure it’s not anachronistic can easily turn into an hour or two looking up other phrases or digging deeper into the source and going off at a tangent. In the interests of accuracy, I often dig far deeper into a subject than the book warrants and end up with reams of research that never gets used. Of course, some if it will probably end up in a blog post at some point, so perhaps it isn’t all wasted time, or is blogging just procrastination in disguise?
Keeping all my character and plot spreadsheets up-to-date feels like proper work, but that too can sometimes end up in more procrastination, especially when it comes to characters. How much information do I really need to know about them? How much backstory that will never be used is too much? I’m fairly sure taking the random photos I found in various places to give me visual cues for each character, putting them through Face App and playing around with them was procrastination. Going further and turning them into watercolour paintings in another app definitely was.
Believe it or not, once in a while, amid all this procrastination, I actually sit down and do some writing. Even then, the temptation to stare into space is huge. Frankly, it’s a wonder I ever get anything written at all.
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