On changing gears and discovering procrastination

One of the main reasons I took the difficult decision to leave Spoiled Milk earlier this year was to try and push myself in a completely new direction and see what I could learn from it.

Attempting to write a novel has been something I wanted to tackle for a long time. Although I’ve done a lot of writing before, it has always been in the factual copywriting arena. The attraction of trying to produce fiction is that the methodologies and processes involved seem so scattered and, for good reason, are vastly different from writer to writer. Unlike ‘crafts’ that involve either teamwork or close client/manager communication, the different ways in which a writer can choose to structure their workflow is seemingly infinite. This coupled with the appeal that no complicated or expensive equipment is necessary—one surely just sits down and writes—I imagined it to be a no-holds-barred way to push one’s cerebral matter to its limits; an open highway of discovery about the inner-being and world we all inhabit!

Right?

Well, apart from getting heavily sidetracked in the months that followed with various enjoyable projects, I have managed to keep up a semi-sustained attack on this idea of writing fiction. I’ve tried just-sitting-and-writing, analysing other works, composing shorts to keep myself warmed up and walking in the woods hoping the next plot twist lies amongst the leaf mulch.

What usually happens is I get so far with a new approach, before realising something profound regarding how my mind works, then scrapping everything I’ve done and starting again. Most of the time this feels like a progressive step and something I expected when I started this with no clue what I was doing. Interestingly, the part that has surprised me most is not that I need to gradually self-educate via trial and error, but rather that I need to combat procrastination.

I’ve not had a problem with motivation for years. This is partly because running a startup company with staff, client and project responsibilities leaves no time to consider anything else but working every spare minute of the day, but also—as I’ve come to realise—because I no longer have my old, faithful work-reward cycles to rely on.

For a long time the immediate reward of focussed working was that the company didn’t crash and everyone was paid at the end of the month (a big incentive believe me), followed very closely by feeling a strong personal responsibility to every client we were working for and wanting to believe every deadline was achievable. Those are the obvious, big things and in this new environment without deadlines, other people or any concrete expectations (my goal here is to attempt to write a novel—I hope that it’s a success obviously, but right now I just want to push myself and see where I end up) it’s easy to see why the words don’t always flow when I sit at my laptop at 9am on a wintry morning.

However, I started thinking more about why I can almost endlessly concentrate on other tasks—things such as software development for example. It didn’t take long to realise that during the 20-odd years I’ve been programming a computer, my brain has become wired up to the short create-result cycle that is involved. Whether one is creating a desktop application, or writing markup for a website, the iterative development cycle of:

1. write some code,
2. compile-and-run, or refresh-the-browser,

provides instantaneous results many times an hour. A successful compilation is the mini pat-on-the-back encouragement that drives me to continue—eagerly seeking the next visual reminder that progress is being achieved.

My partner Lucy and I often discuss the differences in cycle length between software development and the laboratory experiments she conducts as part of her PhD. Her world is fixed partly by the length of time it takes to perform necessary mechanical tasks, but more importantly by the time the biological processes she’s monitoring take to express themselves. Some clumsy syntactic mistake in my code can usually be remedied in minutes, followed by the hit: “0 errors, 0 warnings”. If Lucy makes a mistake, that’s days that have been wasted (I’m sure they’re not entirely wasted, but for the purpose of illustrating the zero-wait, fervour-cycles a programmer can get into, that’s what it feel likes).

The very reason that I’m sat typing this blog post right now, rather than completing the short story exercise I set myself this morning, is because I know in a few minutes I get to push that big “Publish” button and see my work live on the Internet. I’m sure this modern urge for instant gratification is a major reason blogging is a dying trend while Twittering is on the up (I’m still grappling with the reality that a 140-character summary of all this would have probably yielded a better effort-to-satisfaction ratio).

So that’s where I am with this experiment. For all the research, discovery and opening paragraphs I’ve drafted in the last few months, I still need to take a big step back and examine how I can either shoehorn a project as epic as this into my addict-esque requirement for instant feedback, or fundamentally remove the need for those micro-motivations.

Or in a Tweet: “Struggling to stay motivated. Thinking of rewarding myself with a dog biscuit for each paragraph written.”