Do you Really Need to Clean the Bathroom?

Writers and procrastination go together - it's called "letting your subconscious mind work without you watching, while you do boring, dreary crap housework stuff".

I just made that up and pasted it to Facebook, so I claim the copyright on it. If someone steals my words and I see them on the internet, it’s still good though, ‘cos it’s always good to connect with other people. That is the reason why I write. It’s probably why most people write. If it was purely for the money, well, anyone who thinks you can easily make lots of money by writing I hate to say, you are wrong.

Only a few people make lots of money with their writing. Most of the people who make money from writing are already famous for other reasons. Publishers prefer to publish books written by already famous people because it saves them money on promoting the book. The fame does the work for them.

Famous people are probably the people who don’t have the procrastination issue that ordinary writers like me have. They have trainers and life coaches and managers keeping them focussed. They aren’t allowed to procrastinate because other people’s livelihoods depend on them doing stuff. They probably have half an hour wool-gathering time in their diary, and that’s when they do the chill out muddle-head think time that other, ordinary people do, when they are scrubbing the bathroom taps with a nail-brush.

We get side-tracked from the writing we’re meant to be doing, and just meander around a bit. That’s when the subconscious mind gets busy, but it isn’t the sort of thing that shows to onlookers. It doesn’t shoe to the person doing it either, not straightaway, but that’s where those amazing zany ideas come from that totally blow you away when you read what you’re written when the words just flow. That is when the daydreaming and the unnecessary housework thoughts bear fruit.

But, there is also the other side of the procrastination. Cleaning the bathroom and assorted make work jobs happen often for 'blocked' writers! A lot of the time, the silly curtain washing stuff and so on, is just because of fear. It can be a scary thing to write a novel, not knowing if anyone will ever want to read it. Not knowing if it will even be good enough for you to ever read again. Doing housework that doesn’t really need to be done is a way of hiding from your writing, even though the writing is what you should be doing.

You might tell yourself you have plenty of time to do it later, but as Charles Richard, a Canadian politician famously said, ‘Don't be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week's value out of a year while another man gets a full year's value out of a week.

So, no matter what you do, you have your allotted number of days, and it is up to each person to make their best use of those days. If you can’t write unless the bathroom is spotless, well, so be it. But if you are just using the bathroom cleaning as an excuse for your fear, or perhaps laziness, get over it and get writing, that’s what I say!

Use the days you have, and use them to do what you really want to do. The thing that means the most to you should get the most effective time spent on it.