All right, my fellow procrastinators, this one’s for you! I’m pretty sure we’ve all be procrastinators in the past—no one is efficient all the time, right? But it’s when procrastination becomes a habit that interferes with getting your work done and meeting your deadlines and commitments, and generally makes you feel terrible (because you’re letting other people down or, even worse, letting yourself down) that we have to do something to actually break through these blocks and get down to business.
(I do want to tell you that I went to go find this gif on Google and then ended up randomly bouncing around the internet for 10 minutes. Procrastination can happen any time. Be vigilant.)
Procrastination is particularly brutal in the romance genre because the pressure to produce and stay relevant is so intense. But procrastinating and then pushing yourself hard to get writing done is a vicious cycle that honestly can’t be maintained forever. Protect yourself from burnout—I can’t tell you how many romance authors I’ve seen who go so hard in their writing (and of course in other aspects of their lives too) but ultimately come to lose their joy in writing and leave the industry all together. Much better to go slower, work through procrastination traps, and find a sustainable practice that keeps you in love with writing.
If you’re a champion procrastinator, you’ve maybe seen/done these tactics before, but hopefully I can give you at least a couple new strategies to help you bust through the procrastination time-suck.
1) Do what’s best for your brain
Some people are good at measuring out their time, some really love the pressure of “oh shit, it’s due in a week and I’ve been avoiding it for months, but now I’m ready to write,” and some get totally paralyzed by that pressure and spiral. So you have to figure out what works best for you—which is really a trial-and-error practice until you figure it out. We all have a story that we tell ourselves about how we work, but try something different and see if that might actually make more sense for your style of working so that you don’t always need to panic and scramble around a deadline.
2) Figure out the reason(s) behind your procrastination or your writer’s block
I have been the “oh shit, it’s due in a week and I’ve been avoiding it for months, but now I’m ready to write” person and convinced myself that that’s actually how I do my best work. This…was a lie I was telling myself because it justified me putting things off when the real reason I procrastinate—and this is pretty much ALWAYS the real reason for me—is that because whatever it is I need to do feels hard or scary or too big to tackle. I really find that being able to articulate this to myself and define what’s actually going on underneath is a game-changer in terms of efficiency because then I can break it down by saying “okay, what’s scary about this?” which then turns into “what can I do to make this less scary and more manageable?” From there, everything is so much easier and I can push through the procrastination (with the big caveat of this is how my brain works—it may not be how yours works).
3) Chunk it out
Telling yourself that you’ll write 500 words a day earlier in a project feels a lot easier than saying “I’ve got a week left until this is due and I’ll need to write 10K words a day to make it work.” (Not saying that’s not possible, because of course it is, but you’ll very likely burn yourself out that way.) And let’s say here that 500 words a day counts even if you don’t end up using those words in the manuscript—those words are getting you somewhere and helping you create momentum so that writing regularly becomes a habit.
I don’t necessarily advocate for writing every single day—again, this is a very individual thing, and you do what’s best for your brain. I do think, however, that you need a regular writing practice, whether it’s every day or just weekday mornings or only on weekends. Something that’s consistent and your brain can count on you doing.
Instead of chunking out your word count, you can chunk out your time instead. Block out all distractions during your writing time—turn the internet off, leave your phone in another room, close the door and tell everyone else in your house not to bother you, set a timer, and write for X amount of time a day. (I count thinking as writing time, by the way—so even if your fingers aren’t on the keys the whole time and you need to ponder and work through things before writing them down, that still counts.) If you want to keep writing beyond the timer, cool. If you have things to look up while you write (historical fact, spelling, checking a character’s eye colour) or you’re not ready to write a particular scene yet, just TK anything you need to go back to later so you don’t get caught up on it and slow down your momentum.
4) Tweak your writing style
Switching up the way you do things is sometimes a good kick in the pants to supercharge your productivity. If you’re a plotter, maybe your outline is hemming you in too much, so try seeing what would happen if you pantsed a section of your writing. Even if you go off on a tangent that doesn’t do anything, you can just edit it back later, and you’ve learned something about your story. If you’re a pantser, try writing down a loose outline so that you have some kind of direction that can push you forward.
5) Write with a buddy
This might feel a bit Big Brother, but having someone watching you writing is a great motivator to actually, you know, write. If you have a local friend and you can work together in the same place, amazing, but you can also do this over Zoom. You both put your heads down and get to work, but check in every now and then to make sure you’re staying on track. (This doesn’t work with a chatty friend unless they can save the chatting for after the coworking session is done. Or if you are the chatty friend, hold off until the end!) I know tons of people who swear by this method.
6) Know your limits
If you know you’ve never been able to write a book in two months, don’t say you will and schedule your editor (or God forbid, an Amazon release date) for two months from now when you have nothing written yet. Be brutally real with yourself: how long will it actually take you to get this written, while also accounting for procrastination, potential disasters (illness, computer malfunctions, etc.), self-editing time? Don’t heap extra stress on yourself just because you think you “should” be able to get it done in a certain amount of time.