While reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book, “Big Magic,” on a cold winter night, I came across a story about a missed opportunity. I was planning to attend, but not participate in, a local “Pitch It” contest a week or so later, and reading this particular anecdote – about an idea that became someone else’s book –prompted me to enter the contest.
The next day, I emailed the woman running the contest. She asked if I had written a query yet.
“Yes, two years ago,” I admitted.
“It doesn’t matter if you’ve procrastinated,” she said “It’s what you do today that counts – YOLO! Make a commitment to yourself and the story.”
So I signed up and even showed up, joining a roomful of writers on a Saturday morning in February. When it was my turn, my hands shook as I read my one-page query. Even though my pitch was not perfect, my story seemed to resonate with the audience. When I returned to my seat, the YA novelist sitting next to me grabbed my arm and said, “You have to write that book.”
The next week, I received an email informing me that I was one of three winners; my manuscript was going to be sent to a major publishing house.
The catch is that I have no manuscript.
The contest guidelines indicated that works in progress are allowed, and when I was asked when the book would be done, I hesitated and then said that I would complete the first draft by summer. But I had no confidence that this was doable given my track record as someone who has perfected the art of procrastination.
Nothing illustrates my slacker tendencies better than my 1997 purchase of a book titled “It’s About Time: The Six Styles of Procrastination and How to Overcome Them.” Nearly 20 years later, the book remains unopened on a basement bookshelf.
My wait-until-the-last-minute ways started at a young age, persisted in high school and were perfected in college when I routinely pulled all-nighters. My collegiate claim to fame is staying awake to finish a 40-page thesis for three consecutive nights at the end of senior year.
Several years later, as a junior editor in New York, I loved the pace of the monthly magazine where I worked, which started like a waltz at the beginning of each cycle and built to an all out Prince-style dance party by the end of the month before we “put the magazine to bed.”
When I switched to freelancing, I followed the same can’t-do-anything-without-a-deadline routine. This approach has meant that projects with deadlines are completed; ongoing work billed on a monthly basis gets done at the end of the month, but it comes at a cost. I have declined invitations and canceled plans so I could spend weekends and nights at my computer.
The problem is that my pet projects simmer on the back burner, sometimes until the point of no longer being relevant. For example, I have written roughly 40,000 words of the memoir, but when you divide that over four years, that amounts to 27 words a day. I began to think that it might be a project I would have to pursue in retirement. It’s not that I am not productive: just this week I cleaned out all of the frozen blueberries and herbs clustered into a frozen fruit salad at the bottom of my freezer. Sometimes I even write – everything but the memoir.
Then I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book – or at least the first 78 pages – and it provided me with the inspiration I needed to complete the project. “Big Magic” remains neglected on my nightstand with a bookmark peeking out, taunting me to read on. I haven’t had much time for reading now that I have a book to write.