Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators

[Syt]

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-writers-are-the-worst-procrastinators/283773/

Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators

The psychological origins of waiting (... and waiting, and waiting) to work

Like most writers, I am an inveterate procrastinator. In the course of writing this one article, I have checked my e-mail approximately 3,000 times, made and discarded multiple grocery lists, conducted a lengthy Twitter battle over whether the gold standard is actually the worst economic policy ever proposed, written Facebook messages to schoolmates I haven't seen in at least a decade, invented a delicious new recipe for chocolate berry protein smoothies, and googled my own name several times to make sure that I have at least once written something that someone would actually want to read.

Lots of people procrastinate, of course, but for writers it is a peculiarly common occupational hazard. One book editor I talked to fondly reminisced about the first book she was assigned to work on, back in the late 1990s. It had gone under contract in 1972.

I once asked a talented and fairly famous colleague how he managed to regularly produce such highly regarded 8,000 word features. "Well," he said, "first, I put it off for two or three weeks. Then I sit down to write. That's when I get up and go clean the garage. After that, I go upstairs, and then I come back downstairs and complain to my wife for a couple of hours. Finally, but only after a couple more days have passed and I'm really freaking out about missing my deadline, I ultimately sit down and write."

Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out.

Most writers were the kids who easily, almost automatically, got A's in English class. (There are exceptions, but they often also seem to be exceptions to the general writerly habit of putting off writing as long as possible.) At an early age, when grammar school teachers were struggling to inculcate the lesson that effort was the main key to success in school, these future scribblers gave the obvious lie to this assertion. Where others read haltingly, they were plowing two grades ahead in the reading workbooks. These are the kids who turned in a completed YA novel for their fifth-grade project. It isn't that they never failed, but at a very early age, they didn't have to fail much; their natural talent kept them at the head of the class.

This teaches a very bad, very false lesson: that success in work mostly depends on natural talent. Unfortunately, when you are a professional writer, you are competing with all the other kids who were at the top of their English class. Your stuff may not—indeed, probably won't—be the best anymore.

If you've spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package. By the time you're finished, you're more like one of those 1940's pulp hacks who strung hundred-page paragraphs together with semicolons because it was too much effort to figure out where the sentence should end.

The Fear of Turning In Nothing

Most writers manage to get by because, as the deadline creeps closer, their fear of turning in nothing eventually surpasses their fear of turning in something terrible. But I've watched a surprising number of young journalists wreck, or nearly wreck, their careers by simply failing to hand in articles. These are all college graduates who can write in complete sentences, so it is not that they are lazy incompetents. Rather, they seem to be paralyzed by the prospect of writing something that isn't very good.

"Exactly!" said Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, when I floated this theory by her. One of the best-known experts in the psychology of motivation, Dweck has spent her career studying failure, and how people react to it. As you might expect, failure isn't all that popular an activity. And yet, as she discovered through her research, not everyone reacts to it by breaking out in hives. While many of the people she studied hated tasks that they didn't do well, some people thrived under the challenge. They positively relished things they weren't very good at—for precisely the reason that they should have: when they were failing, they were learning.

Dweck puzzled over what it was that made these people so different from their peers. It hit her one day as she was sitting in her office (then at Columbia), chewing over the results of the latest experiment with one of her graduate students: the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you're either born with or not. The people who relish them think that it's something you can nourish by doing stuff you're not good at.

"There was this eureka moment," says Dweck. She now identifies the former group as people with a "fixed mind-set," while the latter group has a "growth mind-set." Whether you are more fixed or more of a grower helps determine how you react to anything that tests your intellectual abilities. For growth people, challenges are an opportunity to deepen their talents, but for "fixed" people, they are just a dipstick that measures how high your ability level is. Finding out that you're not as good as you thought is not an opportunity to improve; it's a signal that you should maybe look into a less demanding career, like mopping floors.

This fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you "really" are is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome. A shocking number of successful people (particularly women), believe that they haven't really earned their spots, and are at risk of being unmasked as frauds at any moment. Many people deliberately seek out easy tests where they can shine, rather than tackling harder material that isn't as comfortable.

If they're forced into a challenge they don't feel prepared for, they may even engage in what psychologists call "self-handicapping": deliberately doing things that will hamper their performance in order to give themselves an excuse for not doing well. Self-handicapping can be fairly spectacular: in one study, men deliberately chose performance-inhibiting drugs when facing a task they didn't expect to do well on. "Instead of studying," writes the psychologist Edward Hirt, "a student goes to a movie the night before an exam. If he performs poorly, he can attribute his failure to a lack of studying rather than to a lack of ability or intelligence. On the other hand, if he does well on the exam, he may conclude that he has exceptional ability, because he was able to perform well without studying."

Writers who don't produce copy—or leave it so long that they couldn't possibly produce something good—are giving themselves the perfect excuse for not succeeding.

"Work finally begins," says Alain de Botton, "when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly." For people with an extremely fixed mind-set, that tipping point quite often never happens. They fear nothing so much as finding out that they never had what it takes.

"The kids who race ahead in the readers without much supervision get praised for being smart," says Dweck. "What are they learning? They're learning that being smart is not about overcoming tough challenges. It's about finding work easy. When they get to college or graduate school and it starts being hard, they don't necessarily know how to deal with that."

Embracing Hard Work

Our educational system is almost designed to foster a fixed mind-set. Think about how a typical English class works: You read a "great work" by a famous author, discussing what the messages are, and how the author uses language, structure, and imagery to convey them. You memorize particularly pithy quotes to be regurgitated on the exam, and perhaps later on second dates. Students are rarely encouraged to peek at early drafts of those works. All they see is the final product, lovingly polished by both writer and editor to a very high shine. When the teacher asks "What is the author saying here?" no one ever suggests that the answer might be "He didn't quite know" or "That sentence was part of a key scene in an earlier draft, and he forgot to take it out in revision."

Or consider a science survey class. It consists almost entirely of the theories that turned out to be right—not the folks who believed in the mythical "N-rays," declared that human beings had forty-eight chromosomes, or saw imaginary canals on Mars. When we do read about falsified scientific theories of the past—Lamarckian evolution, phrenology, reproduction by "spontaneous generation"—the people who believed in them frequently come across as ludicrous yokels, even though many of them were distinguished scientists who made real contributions to their fields.

"You never see the mistakes, or the struggle," says Dweck. No wonder students get the idea that being a good writer is defined by not writing bad stuff.

Unfortunately, in your own work, you are confronted with every clunky paragraph, every labored metaphor and unending story that refuses to come to a point. "The reason we struggle with"insecurity," says Pastor Steven Furtick, "is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel."

About six years ago, commentators started noticing a strange pattern of behavior among the young millennials who were pouring out of college. Eventually, the writer Ron Alsop would dub them the Trophy Kids. Despite the sound of it, this has nothing to do with "trophy wives." Rather, it has to do with the way these kids were raised. This new generation was brought up to believe that there should be no winners and no losers, no scrubs or MVPs. Everyone, no matter how ineptly they perform, gets a trophy.

As these kids have moved into the workforce, managers complain that new graduates expect the workplace to replicate the cosy, well-structured environment of school. They demand concrete, well-described tasks and constant feedback, as if they were still trying to figure out what was going to be on the exam. "It's very hard to give them negative feedback without crushing their egos," one employer told Bruce Tulgan, the author of Not Everyone Gets a Trophy. "They walk in thinking they know more than they know."

When I started asking around about this phenomenon, I was a bit skeptical. After all, us old geezers have been grousing about those young whippersnappers for centuries. But whenever I brought the subject up, I got a torrent of complaints, including from people who  have been managing new hires for decades. They were able to compare them with previous classes, not just with some mental image of how great we all were at their age. And they insisted that something really has changed—something that's not limited to the super-coddled children of the elite.

"I'll hire someone who's twenty-seven, and he's fine," says Todd, who manages a car rental operation in the Midwest. "But if I hire someone who's twenty-three or twenty-four, they need everything spelled out for them, they want me to hover over their shoulder. It's like somewhere in those three or four years, someone flipped a switch." They are probably harder working and more conscientious than my generation.  But many seem intensely uncomfortable with the comparatively unstructured world of work.  No wonder so many elite students go into finance and consulting—jobs that surround them with other elite grads, with well-structured reviews and advancement.

Today's new graduates may be better credentialed than previous generations, and are often very hardworking, but only when given very explicit direction. And they seem to demand constant praise. Is it any wonder, with so many adults hovering so closely over every aspect of their lives? Frantic parents of a certain socioeconomic level now give their kids the kind of intensive early grooming that used to be reserved for princelings or little Dalai Lamas.

All this "help" can be actively harmful. These days, I'm told, private schools in New York are (quietly, tactfully) trying to combat a minor epidemic of expensive tutors who do the kids' work for them, something that would have been nearly unthinkable when I went through the system 20 years ago.  Our parents were in league with the teachers, not us. But these days, fewer seem willing to risk letting young Silas or Gertrude fail out of the Ivy League.

Thanks to decades of expansion, there are still enough spaces for basically every student who wants to go to college. But there's a catch: Most of those new spaces were created at less selective schools. Two-thirds of Americans now attend a college that, for all intents and purposes, admits anyone who applies. Spots at the elite schools—the top 10 percent—have barely kept up with population growth. Meanwhile demand for those slots has grown much faster, because as the economy has gotten more competitive, parents are looking for a guarantee that their children will be successful. A degree from an elite school is the closest thing they can think of.

So we get Whiffle Parenting: constant supervision to ensure that a kid can't knock themselves off the ladder that is thought to lead, almost automatically, through a selective college and into the good life.  It's an entirely rational reaction to an educational system in which the stakes are always rising, and any small misstep can knock you out of the race. But is this really good parenting? A golden credential is no guarantee of success, and in the process of trying to secure one for their kids, parents are depriving them of what they really need: the ability to learn from their mistakes, to be knocked down and to pick themselves up—the ability, in other words, to fail gracefully. That is probably the most important lesson our kids will learn at school, and instead many are being taught the opposite.

I can kinda sympathize. During school I was always a straight A student without really having to work hard. I was good at understanding concepts and the working from that without having to learn too much by heart for tests. And I was always someone who would start work on something when it could not be postponed anymore.

Of course that bit me in the ass when I was at college and I realized late that with all those law subjects this approach didn't work anymore.

[garbon]

I liked this video: http://vimeo.com/85040589

Also, the worst is actually when you wait to the last minute and you know what you are doing is shit but then you get praise for it. Encourages the cycle.

[Iormlund]

Disagree with the premise. I'm not a writer.

[Eddie Teach]

Disagree with the premise. I'm not a writer.

Neither am I, but I did get A's in English.

[celedhring]

I'm a writer and I agree with the premise.

I agree with it so much, that I actually decided to reread the article a couple more times before starting today's work.

[Iormlund]

Disagree with the premise. I'm not a writer.

Neither am I, but I did get A's in English.

To be fair, I got A's in pretty much everything. Until engineering school, that is ...


I had a very interesting experience in high school English. About half of us had attended private schools with a strong emphasis on languages and were practically bilingual. The other half possessed typical, rather poor English skills. This led to a very toxic environment where half the pupils got nothing out of the class and chatted through it non-stop, dragging the other half with them. The reaction of the teachers was to make exams harder, which had no effect on the intended targets: those who knew English still aced the tests, but it wrecked the rest.
Eventually a brave soul decided to do something completely illegal: she quietly segregated us into two groups. One would have half the classes, but the exams would be much harder. You got to choose which group you belonged to. It worked great. Attitudes improved markedly and it was the only high-school English class I actually learned something from.

Years later I went briefly into teaching and the experience only reinforced my belief that mixing students of widely differing aptitudes is evil. Sadly, segregating students that way is anathema here.

[Brazen]

I'm a terrible procrastinator and will always wait until a deadline is looming to properly get started. Case in point, I have a deadline today for a feature on security at the Sochi Games, yet here I am posting on Languish about how I should be writing it

I often talk to my dad about this, he was a graphic designer before he retired. When you have an average office job you can cruise through days when you have a hangover or are a bit tired or just don;t feel like it. In a creative role you walk in to a blank sheet of paper or screen and have to fill it by a particular time. While I may procrastinate over features, news has to be written on the day. The online environment has added extra frisson to that particular pressure.

That thing about the fear of being exposed as a fraud any day is one that resonates with me. How do I get away with doing something I love every day and getting paid for it? And journalism does seem to attract more of these "Trophy Kids" who believe the world owes them a living than other careers. You don't get a byline without having to spit out a few advertorials.

As Douglas Adams once said, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

[Siege]

[Ideologue]

By the time you're finished, you're more like one of those 1940's pulp hacks who strung hundred-page paragraphs together with semicolons because it was too much effort to figure out where the sentence should end.

Pity there's no citation; I could have learned so much.

[CountDeMoney]

I no longer discuss writing in writing threads, as writers are incredibly sensitive about writing.

[Ideologue]

I'm not.

[CountDeMoney]

This is true.  You are impervious to criticism.  And editing. 

[Razgovory]

At one time I did have a the crippling fear of being unmasked as an incompetent.  Now, I'm okay with being an incompetent.

[Ideologue]

This is true.  You are impervious to criticism.  And editing. 

Not impervious, it's just that the first draft is like the Red Army, and quantity has a quality all its own.

[CountDeMoney]

And your readers are German civilians.