In Honor of All the Ways I Avoid Writing
This New Year I have chosen to embrace my reality: making goals for the new year about my writing does not work for me. I have tried 750 words, Nanowrimo, and other tracking methods and loved them all, but still experienced them with a sense of doom and failure. So, I am taking a big step this year, and celebrating the many, many, many ways I creatively avoid writing.
In case you haven’t tried any of these wonderful ways to avoid writing, here are some for inspiration:
Go to a coffee shop. Move to a different seat because the light/sound/space is wrong. Worry about how to pace your cooling drink with your work/bathroom breaks. Think about this until you have to go to the bathroom. Go to the bathroom. Decide to leave when you return from the bathroom because someone took your seat.
Spritz your houseplants with a teensy spray bottle. Use a plant app to check on the health of your plants, ransacking your spice rack as suggested to bolster plant growth. Sit closely to your plants, watching for signs of happiness.
Stare broodily out the window, despairing about your latest rejection email. Google the editors of the journal for several hours trying to determine how personally to take the rejection.
Rearrange all the clutter on your desk (note: the desk remains just as cluttered). Surely, an organized desk space elicits great writing! Reward yourself with a nap once your desk space looks different.
Go on a writing retreat with your best writing buddies. Spend a lot of time choosing which breads and cheeses to bring. Once there, work together all day to resituate the furniture in the Airbnb to your liking. Drink wine. Start rewatching 30Rock, and fall asleep early.
Paint your bedroom a new color. Sit on your bed and watch to make sure the paint is drying appropriately. (note: sitting on bed will lead to falling asleep on bed).
Decide to pick up just one misplaced item in the living room on your way to your writing desk. Discover that cleaning up this one item inevitably leads to a deep and ferocious cleaning of the bathroom.
Buy a new notebook that you really love. Feel too much pressure about the first words that go in this new notebook to write any words down.
Go for a long walk. Many great writers used walking to stimulate ideas. Write some great poems in your head. Forget them by the time you get home.
When the afternoon sunlight is just right, sit under your favorite blanket in your comfiest chair with your computer on your lap like a warm little cat. Promptly fall asleep.
In all seriousness, there is no wasted time—when I am receptive to life, even to my avoidance, there is writing waiting there. And, if I can’t be the poet that day, at least I will be a poem, a wonderfully odd, little poem.
A writer’s ever-cluttered desk with a favorite notebook
