Your Best Procrastination Techniques: GO! When You're Ready, That Is...

It didn't even hit 10 AM this morning before this Monday felt like a particularly aggressive, spiteful, headache-inducing, cocktails-required Monday.

What option does a girl have when faced with such a day other than procrastination?

I don't know about you folks, but I'm motivated to do my best procrastinating in two specific circumstances:

CIRCUMSTANCE 1: Nothing is really due, so why worry about getting started?

CIRCUMSTANCE 2: Everything is due yesterday. But I'm telling you about it today. You'll make time, right?

The Halfway Slump

Let's just start by saying writing is HARD.

All those  people who are all "oh my god I just get so INSPIRED, and I pour out an entire novel in a week!" are either lying, or writing REALLY terrible novels (also known as "first drafts").

As I've mentioned a-multiple-of-five times, I'm pretty OCD, so I tend to write fairly clean drafts. They're probably not working all that well, and there are definitely huge sections that should be cut, or added, or moved, or just BETTER, but the prose usually makes sense, and grammar has been employed.

This means I'm not--will never be--a true "burst of inspiration" type. In fact, I think that type has been made up solely for magazine-bios and romantic ideas of life in a garret. I don't care how good you are (or even how much mess you're willing to tolerate in your drafts), there comes a point in a book where you just say "wait, NOW what?"

Just...don't look down...

Conferences?? Conferences.

Is there anything more bittersweet, more simultaneously-maddening-and-invigorating, more hungover, than a writing conference?

Or any conference? I feel like they're all this way, at least as far as the hangovers go.

I only started going to these a year ago, and I'm horrified I didn't start sooner. They're like miniature doses of grown-up summer camp. Every person there--at least at the writing conferences I've picked out so far--is passionate about this stuff, ready to talk about books, and craft, and their projects, and your project, and whether or not literacy is really declining, and whether or not that makes any difference in our opinion of The Hunger Games.

(Answer: who cares, that book was fun.)

Every time I go, the dream of doing this full-time feels brighter, more vital, and more in reach (yes, even after a tough critique) than it did before...

...but my life feels that much worse when I get back. Not least because a bunch of writers without any real responsibility are gonna go out for a BUNCH of cocktails. Monday morning does not look bright after five days of too much bourbon and too little sleep, I tell 'ya.

Conference-land is like a playground, filled with witty conversation, interesting people, and did I mention all the drinks? It makes ordinary life seem so dull by comparison. You mean I really have to still do THIS? Every day? Until indefinitely?

You can't be serious.

If only I had endless money (and vacation days) to spend on endless conferences.

Since I don't...I'd better get writing.

What's Best for Creativity?

This morning, I woke up extra-early for work, like I do everyday, so I could spend at least a few precious minutes staring at my computer, working on the next novel (I obviously find plenty of time to do not-work at my job, but the kind of focus that I need to work on a novel vs. an essay or a blog is just...different).

Feel free, at this point, to pat me on the back for being saintlike in my devotion to my craft. That half-hour of zombie-staring at a screen, then frantically typing a few sentences I'll fiddle with, slowly, the next morning is pretty much heroic.

But since today is Friday, and my body clock just doesn't want to be in bed before 12 or 12:30 most nights, I was extra tired.

Stupid tired.

So of course I thought it would be a good idea to introduce a second maybe-love-interest to a story in which I intend there to be zero actual romances.

Terrible idea? Or best idea ever?

That depends on me, of course, and whether my skepticism towards teen romance (which I maintained EVEN AS A TEEN) will win this fight; but it did get me thinking (slowly, thickly, rusty-gears style): when do you get your best ideas?

There are a lot of tired maxims about creativity: "you'll get great ideas in the shower," or "the best ideas come when you least expect them," or "write drunk, edit sober."

Is there any truth to any of them? Is my brain's being so painfully tired that I think, right now, I can actually feel it throbbing, a good reason to trash everything I wrote this morning...or to trust it? Should I start pulling out my computer around the start of cocktail number two?

What's the best state to be in to GET ideas (obviously this is all personal)...and what's the best state to be in to execute them?