In his book on Telling Lies for Fun & Profit — a book on writing fiction (and not a book on becoming a lawyer!) – Lawrence Block describes something he calls creative procrastination. Block introduces the subject — as so many other authors have done after him — by noting that Edward Young called procrastination the “thief of time” in 1742 and by referring to the the often quoted words by Lord Chesterfield: “No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination; never put off till tomorrow what you can do today”.
Block doesn’t bash procrastination. Instead, he says that it has its place. He does observe that “those writers who sit down and write, day in and day out, are the very writers who get the most accomplished” and that “procrastination in general is a massive liability”.
After saying that, however, he writes about how something he calls creative procrastination can be a massive asset for writers. Block used to very quickly transform ideas into written text when he was in his youth. He would get one idea on an afternoon and have a written story ready for his agent the following morning (!). As he became older, he let go of the habit of immediately starting typing out this ideas.
As an example of how creative procrastination helped him he describes his experience of writing a mystery story. It began by him getting the idea to the story, he got what he calls a Noteworthy Idea. In his youth he would have gone straight to his typewriter to type out the story. In this case he wouldn’t have gotten far because he didn’t have anything other than an undeveloped idea, a fragment of a thought. He had no plot, no theme, no characters and no conflict — he lacked all the details necessary for good (or at least passable) fiction.
Instead of starting working on the story immediately, he scribbled down the idea on his todo list. He saw the idea every now and then — every time he looked at his memo pad. Block goes on describing how when he read the the note about the idea, his subconscious would develop it slightly, make it a bit fuller and more detailed.
By letting the idea rest, and by not starting to work on it immediately, Block allowed the idea to develop in his mind, while he was busy writing other stories and reading inspiring books and poetry. Then, one day, he felt that he was ready to write the story. So he sat down at his typewriter and started typing.
Block calls this process creative procrastination. I think that creative incubation is a more apt name for what he did. While it’s procrastination in the sense that there’s postponement involved, I don’t consider it procrastination if you let an idea rest before you have some kind of plan of action. I’m not a fiction writer and don’t plan on becoming one, but it makes sense to let ideas develop in your subconscious a while before you start typing them out.
That’s not procrastination, that’s just a smart thing to do.
A key part of this process is to keep the Noteworthy Idea visible.
“It’s important, I think, to keep the idea visible — in a notebook, on a wallchart, whatever. That way you’ll jog your memory from time to time, and when an idea or a piece of information comes along that you can use, you’ll reach out and incorporate it in the story as it evolves.”
And as for the difference between regular procrastination and creative procrastination, Block writes:
“When it [procrastination] consists of avoiding work rather than postponing it, and when my alternative to working on Project A is not working at all. Since I’m inherently lazy, I force myself to work on Project B instead.”
I don’t know how useful it’s to label yourself as “inherently lazy” and I think there are better ways of getting started than “forcing” yourself, but those are subjects for another post. If you get a good idea, write it down, look at it at regular intervals, and notice how your subconscious develops it automatically until you one day pretty much just know what you want to write, or create.