Writing & “Writing”

“A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.”
-Bill Watterson

There’s a paradox with writing that I think everyone has experienced in some way, even if you’re not a writer. I’m talking about when you sit down to write and then quickly get to a point in your modern-day adaptation of Moby Dick, except it’s an English woman working as an executive assistant for a prominent politician, and you realize while writing a driving scene that you’re not actually sure what England’s driving laws would be for a particular situation. You quickly open up your web browser to do some research, but then two hours later, you’re on your fifth youtube video from a British comedian specializing in pedestrian related pranks.

This is what I call “writing” versus writing. It’s a special type of avoidance that we sometimes allow to take over our own effectiveness. Because hey, you sat down to write, you utilized your precious time and energy doing this, and you’ll even tell yourself it was productive—but it wasn’t. We experience this type of avoidance at work, doing household chores, or just about anything we view as a task we don’t want to do. It might be spending an hour dusting while listening to a podcast rather than doing the dishes that are starting to smell bad in the sink. It might be me writing one of these newsletters rather than responding to a few emails sitting in my work email’s inbox. So when you sit down to write, are you writing? Or are you “writing”?

“Writing” isn’t something that is necessarily a bad thing at its surface, research is important when you’re writing a story, especially when you’re wanting to be accurate enough to avoid the annoying corrections from the Neil deGrasse Tysons of the world. But for myself, and from what I’ve heard from so many other writers, research is the dumb excuse we tell ourselves to avoid doing what we actually sat down to do. What’s annoying is that we still took the time to sit down and write. That time is gone after we’ve wasted it, but rather than spending it effectively writing new prose, we went down a rabbit hole to find information that is going to serve as texture in our prose, nothing more.

So how do we avoid this? I know for me, I spent years failing to avoid this. It took some serious changes to my writing time to overcome this. Because sometimes just keeping your web browser closed, or turning your wifi off aren’t enough. Not when you can just as easily turn the wifi back on with a few clicks. You need to replace that avoidance tendency with a different action altogether. When I get to a point in my writing where I need to research something to be accurate, rather than risk the temptation of the distraction gods, I don’t research the thing at that moment, instead I’ll writer placeholder text that will prompt me to research later when I come back to revise. To go back to the English executive assistant example, I’d literally just write in the middle of my prose something like this: [look up what the left turn laws in England are. I know turning right on red is generally a uniquely American traffic law, but would someone in a hurry there be seen as an ass if they turned left on red? Cuz, you know, they drive on the left side over there, those crazy tea drinking Harry Potter bastards.]

I always put it in those brackets so that I can easily do a search in the word document for instances where I’ve done this, but I also bold it so that my eye doesn’t mistake it for finished prose when I send it out to my writers group for feedback. And sometimes, depending on how great the desire to be avoidant, I’ll use colorful language and profanity to make me laugh and to make the avoidant side of me feel like it was successfully rebellious. This last bit sounds like a joke, but it honestly works for me.

Writing time is precious. Any time that we set aside for being creative is worth protecting. Especially when we are pulled in so many different directions with work, life, school, or whatever it is. Even if you’re feeling slightly avoidant about spending your time being creative, don’t allow yourself to fall into this pit of faking being productive. In my view, it’s better to blow off the time entirely and watch television versus pretending to write while spending it researching stuff that won’t be applicable for your story. Besides, television is better fake research anyway.

-Jacob