Rebloggable by request: On Procrastination

[neil-gaiman]

Hello Mr. Gaiman! Before anything else please give me a moment to fangirl over the fact that you could be reading this right now (laskhflkjwehskjfhw). Anyway I’d just like to ask: do you ever procrastinate? This isn’t meant to put you in a bad light or anything, I just kind of want to know, how do you deal with it, if you -do- actually procrastinate? Do you have any advice for us procrastinators? Thanks for answering, Mr. Gaiman, and if you can’t thanks all the same. Keep up the wonderful work!☺

 phoeniqx

Of course. I am human, and I have a Twitter account and a Tumblr account, and frankly, there is nothing Lisa Simpson does in the “Book Job" episode of the Simpsons I was in to avoid writing that I haven’t done too.

How I dealt with it over the years:

1) If I did not write it then it would not be written and I would not be paid for it and my family would not eat. This was a huge motivator for the first half of my career.

2) I’d quite like it to exist. There are people waiting for it who want to read it. Sometimes I’ve come up with some kind of an incentive program, in which I am (for example) allowed to go for a walk when I have written enough for the morning. Or someone I like will do something nice for me if I made my word count.

3) Step away from the Internet. Turn it off, or go somewhere it doesn’t exist, or write with paper and a pen, or do whatever you need to to place yourself in a world in which YOU ARE ALLOWED TO WRITE OR NOT DO ANYTHING AT ALL, JUST STARE OUT OF THE WINDOW. But you can’t do anything that isn’t writing or not doing anything.

Staring out of the window gets boring after a while, and it is more interesting to write.