Writing Your Novel: Avoiding Procrastination

procrastination

/prə(ʊ)ˌkrastɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/

noun

noun: procrastination; plural noun: procrastinations

                                             the action of delaying or postponing something.

"your first tip is to avoid procrastination"

So none of you probably need the dictionary definition but by happy coincidence your first tip is to stop procrastinating. Today I wanted to tell you the story about how I used to be a procrastinator, until the Universe intervened and kicked my ass into submission. 

Procrastination doesn't just apply to the writing your novel part - it's about the whole process.

I wrote my first novel (that's Edelweiss; Dark Science, part one) by hand and mostly sitting in the
bathroom of my University dorm. It was the only place in the building you could smoke without the warden catching you and I didn't have a laptop back then. Just to give you some idea of the timescale I went to Uni back in 2008 and I didn't publish until 2016. That's not to say I was sitting on my hands the whole time, but it ought to give you an impression of how long it took me to build my confidence up enough to even send the damn thing away.

The thing is, you see, that I wrote it easily enough. I wrote it over and over again because I lost pages.The procrastination didn't kick in until it was written. What did I do with it next? In the end it lived in a drawer for a few years while I dealt with some weird life stuff. I forgot about it for a while, then I remembered and bought a new laptop to type it up on.

The new laptop was brilliant. I went through every piece of paper I had ever written and typed it onto digital format. Up until then I had always been a pen and paper writer. I'm going to go ahead and say that this was a major turning point for me. With a laptop over a desktop you can just punch notes in that you never lose - and I've lost a lot of work in my time.

Anyway, I had finished typing Edelweiss up and saved it on to disk, gone through my bucket of notes and got most of it done. I couldn't decide what to do next so I powered on and wrote Valerian as well. I worked my way through the third novel while I was there - all of this without actually doing anything with the novel. Then Windows 10 happened in 2015(?) and I used a temporary profile one night to work in. The next morning all my work was gone. Absolutely all of it. Every poem, every story, every note - and the manuscripts.

I tried everything. I reverted my settings, I had my techy cousin look at it, I called Windows... it didn't matter and I never got it back. At 30 years old and with all the work I had ever written destroyed I had two options: give up or start again. Now let's be clear about this, I felt like someone had died. I was absolutely gutted. Many of those notes that I typed I had thrown the originals for away and loads of it was just lost forever. To this day I still think about the loss of some of those pieces. Old scripts from University, shorts from when I was still learning the trade... stuff that was more valuable for the memories than the actual content.Argh. Give up and go home or start again. Judging by the fact you are reading this now you can probably imagine what I chose.

I started writing again, I rewrote the whole damn thing. This time I wrote the intro and sent it to a bunch of literary agents whose names I had looked up online. I didn't manage to secure one, although some really positive feedback came through from one agent who had read it, really liked it and couldn't get behind it because it was too dark. After it was completed, edited and formatted to the best of my ability (which, at the time, wasn't much. It's better now, I promise) and decided to self publish through Amazon.

During that time period I wrote like a demon. I decided to self publish after sending short stories out and having a few published by other people. I figured that if other people thought my work was good enough that they could make money from it - then why wasn't I? OK so it's not much money but the alternative was literally sitting in a drawer gathering dust for nearly ten years... so what did I have to lose?

Self-Publishing is Losing the Stigma

There are thousand other authors out there with the same story as me. Not only that, but publishing contracts are getting worse and worse. I have witnessed people advertise for ghostwriters for fifty dollars... I have seen 'contracts' for books valued at $500. I have seen people pay half a cent a word for literary genius and I can promise you - publishers are not all they are cracked up to be. The rates some of them want you to work for equate to pennies per hour.

Basically what I am saying is give it a go. Send your manuscript out to the big fish and see if they

bite, If you don't you'll never know. This whole business is a sea of rejection but the important thing to remember is that your work won't fit everywhere. It's not going to be right for some people no matter how good it is. So there isn't any point in letting the rejection get to you. Keep sending, keep submitting, keep writing. You will be successful as long as you don't give up. If the big fish don't want it then self publish and start working on the next one.

Procrastination is a terrible thing. Don't let it eat your work, don't let it put you down and certainly don't give in to it. The Indie Author industry is huge and growing, and there are some of us who believe it is the new way of writing. Jump in with both feet and move on to the next novel...take it from someone who learned the hard way.