One of my favorite procrastinators of all time is Leonardo da Vinci. This same man who painted The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa also laid plans for aircraft and submarines hundreds of years before their time. In addition being a painter and inventor, he was also a sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. He was as talented as he was distractable, but I’m inclined to believe the latter was just as vital as the former.
If he had been better able to focus on one field and one field only, we might only have known him as, say, Leonardo da Vinci, the cartographer, or Leonardo da Vinci, the botanist. I’m sure he would have been a super cartographer or botanist, but had Leonardo da Vinci actually been able to focus, our culture just wouldn’t be the same. Other famous procrastinators include Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust, and Douglas Adams, who famously once said, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
So here’s to procrastination, the destroyer of time but also great mother to creativity. Because, as we’ve discussed before and will inevitably discuss again, the time during which you are not creating is just as important as when you are.
What with this blog and my new day job and this thing I’m trying to experience called life, it’s been hard lately to discipline myself to sit down at my desk and actually write. But I suppose it’s always been like that. I’ll tell myself that I’m going to finish editing a draft of a short story, or actually write the damn thing in the first place, and then suddenly I’m on YouTube watching someone talk about bottled water or on Arts & Letters Daily or kottke.org and finding links to articles about the power of positive deviants or the political power of cartography or how con artists can exploit human behavior or any number of wonderful, interesting things that I might not have ever bothered to read if I hadn’t felt the need to distract myself from doing something else. And then the sun goes down and I find myself sitting at my desk, no closer to a completed draft of my story and experiencing an odd paradox of feeling–my sense of enlightenment and creativity and openness that comes from reading these various articles and learning these new things is countered by heavy, pressing guilt because I just didn’t get my work done.
But what I’m coming to realize is that’s not really true. Procrastination is part of the creative process. When I’m reading these articles, I’m still working. I’m gathering material for a new piece of fiction one month down the road, or one year, or ten years. I’ve heard countless times how I’m supposed to read widely and voraciously from professors, writers, friends, and I’ve always assumed they were talking about fiction. But I think the same applies to nonfiction–it’s ongoing research. By this line of thinking, watching an episode of Intervention (to learn more about drug addiction) or Law & Order (to learn more about the legal system) or American Idol (to learn more about, uh, disappointment) could all count as “research.”
Clearly this is where things start to get sticky. Not all procrastination has value, and clearly you’re not going to learn anything more about the world to use in your writing from watching YouTube videos about ninja cats or Chinese lip-synching Backstreet Boys. And even all the reading and “research” I do won’t have any value if I never get around to actually concentrating and writing at least some of the time. Leonardo da Vinci himself occasionally bemoaned his tendency to become involved in so many things, because he left so many projects unfinished.
So yes, procrastination can be inadvertently enlightening and inspiring and a boon to your writing, but the caveat is this: you’ll actually have to write at some point. So use your non-writing time wisely. Another one of my favorite examples about writers spending their time doing things other than writing is Joyce Carol Oates, who gardens, walks, and runs every day, all the while envisioning scenes and fixing structural problems in her current novels in her head. She explained it best in her essay “Running and Writing”:
Living for a sabbatical year with my husband, an English professor, in a corner of Mayfair overlooking Speakers’ Corner, I was so afflicted with homesickness for America, and for Detroit, I ran compulsively; not as a respite for the intensity of writing but as a function of writing.
As I ran, I was running in Detroit, envisioning the city’s parks and streets, avenues and expressways, with such eidetic clarity I had only to transcribe them when I returned to our flat, recreating Detroit in my novel ”Do With Me What You Will” as faithfully as I’d recreated Detroit in ”Them” when I was living there.
I thought I would end the article with a video that Alex showed me a while ago, and which I think perfectly summarizes the subject at hand. I got the embed code off the YouTube site, and staying true to form, I watched a handful of videos while I was there. I now feel all the more enlightened.
