I procrastinate.

This is a post about why I am taking on this thirty-day project. I’ve thought about various ways to frame the ‘why’. Questions such as, ‘Given the dubious nature of the internet as a medium for human expression mentioned in my first post, why blog? What are its benefits?’ Or, ‘Why blog now?’ certainly serve as possible ways of getting at the ‘why’. The fact that I recently finished my Mdiv, my reading has dropped off and I don’t want my brain to atrophy also provides impetus. But I think I am in the midst of a true donnybrook that bears witness to the reason I signed up for this. I procrastinate. The battle to sit down, and actually start writing is the reason that I am doing this. I want to learn how to win it.
Its April 5th, and I have only made two postings. This mere fact deserves an LOL of the hardiest order. It is hilarious that I didn’t even make it three days. Go ahead, have a good chuckle. It’s really the only way to stare such a painful reality in the face. It was after having a good laugh at my own expense that I saw so clearly, with such precision, exactly what the hardest part of writing is, and always will be. The hardest part of writing is getting started.

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My plan for a thirty day blogfest was conceived when I asked my friend and professor Dr. Ralph C. Watkins (charmingly featured above on the cover of his first book) for a few writing tips. His response offered quite a challenge: write everyday. People who write everyday, he informed me, write on average 75 more usable pages per year than people who write the same number of hours in bigger blocks. So I challenged myself to write everyday for a month, and choose April, nestled so neatly as it was between March and May. Unfortunately, Ralph gave me this tip almost 23 months ago. It took me a while to get started. But in the intervening months I have kept my ears open for other reasons that writing everyday is better than so-called binge writing.

First, and perhaps most interesting, is that when we work on something everyday, our brains think about it more, even when we stop. It turns out that your brain keeps many, if not most, of its functions secret from you, and even when you stop thinking about something, your brain kicks it around in your subconscious for a while. Thus people wake up with a solution to a problem they had the previous day, or awake in the darkest part of night with a key insight about something in their lives. When you write everyday, you give your brain more time to dismantle and assemble the constituent parts of your chosen topic.

Second, it helps you develop your own voice. What does it sound like when I write? I have no idea. I know what I want it to sound like, which is like Jonathan Safran Foer. But see, the trick is, I’m not Jonathan Safran Foer.

Last, and best of all, writing everyday will help you learn how to get started. Writing and procrastination have a long friendship. I once read that low self-esteem contributes directly to procrastination. Thus, the longstanding friendship between writing and procrastination seems natural enough, as good writing requires a bit of self-loathing. But it’s time for writing to sleep with procrastination’s ambiguous but yet unclaimed love interest, and end that friendship. Writing everyday forces you to face the challenge of starting to write, and to get good at overcoming it.

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Do you procrastinate, or have trouble getting started? Why? The low-self esteem tag rests quietly on my toe; every time I start something, someone deep within me is convinced it is going to suck. I started blogging everyday so I can get good at telling that guy to shut it.