There are many communities, websites, and blogs on the internet that dispense advice on how to finally sit down and write the work you’ve always wanted to write. There’s almost too many of them. In order to stand out from the crowd, I’m taking the contrarian approach and will give you insight into how I have avoided writing a well-written and meaningful blog this week.
My favored methods of procrastination have been:
- Watching videos on YouTube, starting with channels I’m subscribed to , linking onto videos YouTube suggests, and finally watching painfully unfunny comedy sketches because a girl the thumbnail looked pretty.
- Sorting laundry
- Reading Twitter, starting with people that I’m Following, linking to accounts of people that those people have retweeted, and finally clicking through twitpics of steampunk cosplayers. (FYI – I’m amused at how many words my spellcheck doesn’t recognize in that previous sentence.)
- Reading through all the freewrites I wrote this week three times or more each, wondering, even though I don’t like any of them to post, if I can combine any of them to make at least something mediocre.
- Lunch
- Dentist Appointment
- Folding laundry
- Trying to figure out what I’m going to talk about with my friends who I usually meet with every other Monday to discuss creative goals and accomplishments.
- Having a meeting with friends to discuss your creative accomplishments when you haven’t accomplished anything.
- Play 007 Goldeneye on the Wii
- Play 007 Legends on the Xbox 360.
- Listen to podcast video game and movie reviews.
- Google “TED Talks: Procrastination”
- Go to adviceforwriters.com and read page after page as if this somehow will excuse me from not writing
- Holding my head in my hands, staring at my desk, despondent that people are expecting more out of me and my writing than a bulleted list.
- Reassuring myself that I’m only doing this for myself and that the important thing is that I meet my deadline and word count. Get the job done.
- Worrying that people are going to respond sympathetically , which, I know, sounds backwards, but would have me feeling like I presented myself as a loser instead of having written something clever, something many of us relate to that we all can find amusing.
- OK, look, man, really this is a cry for help. You know it. The people reading this know it. You haven’t convinced anyone.
- No, at best this is a cry for help. Call it what it really is. A last minute excuse to write the simplest dreck possible just so you can say you didn’t miss posting a blog this Monday.
- Brainstorm various ways to actually write this as an insightful, well-crafted piece.
- Scrap those ideas. Google “sexy cosplay”
Derek Fetters Writes 
Testing, 1,2,3,
I think this list is funny, and it’s funny because it’s true. The one thing that’s always haunted me over the years is that everything I’ve written that’s been of value came only after I’d landed in “the belly of the whale”. In other words, I could not achieve any kind of success with anything I’d written until I reached a point of despair and then fought through the emotional distress. It wasn’t until after I read Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice to a young poet that I began to understand that I wasn’t the only one who had to make this journey, over and over again. There are times whne I feel that the desire to write something artful is an affliction, more to be endured than to celebrate. I guess this is why more than one successful writer has advised younger writers to write only if you find there is no alternative.
If nothing else your truthful blogpost made me smile. I’ve been there, not as a writer but as an online seller. I know this routine well.