Write every day.  Write at the same time every day. Write at the same place everyday.

From lower school on, teachers, workshop leaders, and other writers have reminded us of  these tenets of good writing practice. In On Writing, Stephen King says he writes every morning and recommends that a writer’s desk face a wall to avoid distractions.  Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, interprets the every day rule as  “My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not. No one lives up to his ideal.” In other words, don’t beat yourself up if you take a day or two off.  Just don’t avoid it for a third day; this will invariably extend to a  fourth, fifth and so on. Procrastination breeds guilt and kills imagination.

Here are ways I rationalize my procrastination: My ideas are percolating all the time. I write when I jot a word down on a napkin while out to dinner.  Manual activity, like pasting images in my photography journal, exercises the creative part of the brain. Is it the right side? I can never remember. Then I will research the brain, after which I might throw a dark load into the washing machine.

Procrastination is a sign of fear, fear of rejection, fear of criticism, and, the great kahuna, fear that your writing is just plain bad, boring, sophomoric.  In her book Bird by Bird, Annie Lamott offers a bit of solace.  “I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good at it.”  I have advised my students to let go of the fear because one of the cool things about writing is that it is never finished. We write and revise endlessly.  Revision liberates us.  As Gertrude Stein once said, writing is writing is writing is writing.