We've put it off long enough. It's time to talk about procrastination.

Procrastination is an ugly, pejorative word. It is a stick to beat yourself with, a kick when you are down. Inherent in the word itself is a moral judgment. The judge and jury have already met. The verdict is passed. You are guilty without appeal.

The cruel irony of procrastination is that it becomes what it sets out to condemn. As soon as we start beating on ourselves for procrastinating, we find ourselves even more lacking in drive, even less motivated to do the writing that needs to be done.

Demoralizing, life-sapping words like should and ought and can't start to reverberate in your head. You find what little energy you had draining away. And you promptly think of several more distractions to keep you from writing.

Procrastination paralyzes and then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Getting to the Root of It
Most advice about procrastination has a major drawback: it treats the symptoms, not the cause. Motivational tricks get you moving again; enticing reward act as a carrot on a string, but unless you figure out what made the writing mule balk in the first place, you will not go very far. Sure, you might get him going again, but if your have not figured out what he was afraid of, you do not know how to prevent it from happening further down the road. Soon the carrot trick does not work anymore.

I promised you I would change the nature of your relationship with writing permanently; in order to do that, you need to get behind the procrastination, not just around it, and find out what is causing it in the first place. Treat the cause and not the symptoms.

Resistance Has Meaning
I am always leery of absolutes. Myself, I never use them. Like Jane Austen's Edmund Bertram of Mansfield Park, "I trust that absolutes have gradations." Yet there is one absolute I will always stand behind. Resistance always has meaning. When you find yourself reluctant to act, your body and your mind are trying to tell you something.

When you delve into the meaning behind whatever it is that you are resisting, you will discover that there are choices underlying the work stoppage, a payoff that makes not writing somehow more attractive than writing. You may be resisting completing a certain writing project because you don't want to face having your boss tear it apart.

Fighting Resistance Never Works
A funny thing happens when you fight resistance. It gets worse.

Do not fight procrastination. When you get into a power struggle, you often lose. Either you become either more paralyzed, or if you force yourself to write, in spite of a negative energy pushing you in the opposite direction, chances are you will produce turgid, plowing prose that is awful to read, certainly not your best work. When you write with your teeth gritted, what you write grits the teeth of your reader.

On the other hand, if you acknowledge procrastination, you do not need to dramatize it. It is not just a noticing, it is a letting go.

Rather than opposing force with force, overcome it by yielding. Move toward the procrastination, move with it. What does it have to tell you?

Perhaps you are starting to see that procrastination is not an outside force and you are not a helpless victim. Procrastination comes from resistance inside, and you can make choices. You are in charge. You can take command of the situation, move forward, and write. In the rest of this chapter, we will look at specific ways to get at the meaning behind your own procrastination.

When you are no longer encumbered by the psychological drain of procrastination, you will be free to do your best and most fluent writing ever.

Copyright © Henriette Anne Klauser, 1987. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.