I am not a member of the leave-it-to-the-last-minute club. I rarely procrastinate. Homework assignments, cleaning my room, laundry – they’re all things I do on time, if not ahead of time. Even tedious assignments are usually accomplished the day they’re given to me. But the one thing that I truly love – that I care enough to pursue a career in – I can’t ever seem to get around to doing.
I love writing. I love the process; I love sitting for minutes or hours trying to figure out the right word to make a sentence sound the way I want it to. But there’s also something so irritating to the process, the stillness it requires, the frustration that sinks in when it’s 2 AM and I can’t think of that word I’ve been trying to conjure up for hours.
I write best with a deadline; I know that about myself. But the deadlines I give myself are always ridiculously shortened versions of what I am originally assigned. Case in point, it’s 10:31 PM, this is due at midnight, and I’m 300-something words short of the minimum. I don’t mind. I know I’ll get there, because once I start writing, it’s a train that just keeps rolling.
The problem is when the train gets distracted. The train gets distracted by nearly anything, including the aforementioned homework, messy room, or dirty laundry, banal tasks that to me are more entertaining than doing something I truly care about. And once the train stops rolling, it’s nearly impossible for it to gain momentum again. I have folders upon folders of unfinished projects growing cobwebs in the corners of my laptop. Stories and essays that I was once incredibly excited just to begin now lay dormant, forgotten about, destined to be opened by me months or years later, when I’ll feel a distinct pain of regret. It’s been happening for years, and I don’t expect it to stop any time soon. When I do finish something, it’s a source of immense pride, and I like that feeling. The finished pieces that I’m proudest of haven’t been read by any eyes except my own, and I’m okay with that, because what I accomplished is personal and enough. And many of those pieces are still stuck in the editing stage, littered with notes to self and parenthesis you should rewrite this entire section parenthesis and if I ever get the motivation, I swear I’ll do it.
So I write best when the train never stops. I write best when I can sit undistracted for the amount of time I need and put all the things I have to say on paper. I can write fast, and while it might not be my best, I know by the end of the night I’ll have a finished piece. It might be messy, and words might be missing, and maybe I’ll have used a certain word too many times, but I know those are things that can be fixed in the morning. What can’t be fixed is how I’ll never be satisfied until something is finished, done in one go, no longer captive in my head where only I can see it. Maybe that’s the reason why I gave up trying to write novels, or do something big, and settled instead on short stories and essays. The kind of writing that isn’t life-changing in a big or showy kind of way, but instead quietly worms its way into a reader’s head, a sentence or two that lingers, sticks around and comes back at the strangest times, in a room lit only by sunlight, in an empty classroom, at a beach where everything is grey because there is no distinction between water and sky. Sometimes I think of things I’ve read when I’m alone in quiet places. I don’t know if other people do, but I’d love to write something that sticks. Something remembered by the people that it mattered to. That’s the kind of thing I’d love to write, if only I could ever get around to it.
