Thursday, June 11, 2009

Sigh, the story of my life

The story of my life, via Noah Millman (suitably modified, of course, for my life, but I'll let you fill in the gaps):

When I got out of school, my ambition was to write. And I started a novel, as yet unfinished.

I worked on the book for a number of years, but increasingly my “day job” – that is to say, my career – got in the way. But that’s not really a fair way to put it: it’s fairer to say that my career was an escape, a kind of grand procrastination scheme.

Then, as my career advanced, my writer’s itch returned. I started blogging, in part to scratch that itch, but also as a way of procrastinating from the responsibilities of my career.

Now, lately, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to blog. Sometimes I really want to write about A, and wind up blogging about B as a way of procrastinating from writing about what I want to write about. Sometimes I just kill time.

And when I take the next step, and find ways of procrastinating from killing time to avoid blogging to escape my job to forget my novelistic ambitions . . .

(But perhaps I’ve just done it?)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I get the gut feeling that there are some other activities creeping into your mind so much so that you are not concentrating with genuine willingness towards your desire to accomplish your dreams. There would often be times that seem as disturbing or many such obstacles but accept it as a challenge, am sure then you would blog and get on to be a well-known novelist.

Anonymous said...

Maybe you were never good enough to write a novel except in your own mind!

Anonymous said...

I fail to see the suitable modification :)

scritic said...

Well, modifications as in - at least he blogged as a way of avoiding writing his novel and he is a pretty successful blogger too. I've no excuse for not writing -- no blogging to speak of, no other claim to fame -- I've just not written anything, period.

Anonymous said...

Hmm, so you wanted it to be interpreted with suitable modification.

Procrastination (or whatever else you want to call it) seems so universal that the excerpt may be applicable to many in one form or another.

If this blog is any indication, you write very well. I wouldn't know what else it takes for someone to be a novelist, I don't even have a blog :). But you should certainly work on your unstarted/unfinished novel :)

While this may not apply to you, Procrastination need not always be bad. There are people (and they arent rare if I may extrapolate) who can deal with the regret of not trying much better than the disappointment that can come with trying and not succeeding.