Christmas is a time for marking / family / recovering / writing *

So much to do...

With so much to do and so little time, it's a wonder anything gets done at all. At least, that's how I feel most of the time. But with the end of term looming (2 days and counting till the kids I teach go away and the kids I procreated are with me 24/7) I'm feeling a little bit more space around me.

I have no lessons to plan for the next two weeks. My evenings will be mine (more or less) for the next two weeks. So this is the ideal time to re-commence my writing which, truth be told, has been relegated to the bottom of the to-do list this last month or so. So why am I feeling so unmotivated? A genuine question to which I would like an answer.

Last night, work done, children in bed, I finally got my laptop out with the intention of reading over the last 3 chapters I've written, add in some scenes that have been floating around inside my head for the past couple of weeks, maybe write the next chapter (I've planned it all out - it's not like I even need to think about where the plot is going next).

I settled into my nice new comfy chair, and then....

I opened up a tab on Chrome and idly looked at Facebook. Then I remembered it's nearly Christmas so I checked my partner's Amazon wishlist. Then I had a look for chemistry sets for my daughter.

I went to bed not having written a single word. I am ashamed but not, I fear, alone.

Procrastination is the root of all evil. I am convinced. And writers (or wannabe writers) are perhaps the worst offenders. A quick Google search will produce hundreds of results on the topic, but an article in The Atlantic particularly caught my eye, perhaps because I am a teacher. It proposes that writers are the worst procrastinators because "We were too good in English class". It goes on to argue that, never having needed to try in English at school, we have not experienced that necessary sense of failure (at least, when it comes to writing). And I can kind of understand that. All my English teachers and university tutors have always been so complimentary about my writing skills that I am terrified of writing something that's, well,... shit.

I don't have pretensions to be an Oscar Wilde or a Margaret Atwood, but I do want to be good. And apparently, "The fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you 'really' are is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome". Who knew? And moreover, women are more prone to this than men (although I'll leave that for another time).

So, to return to my original point, perhaps the reason there is so much to do in a very limited amount of time is because, being the genius procrastinators we are, we create the extra work ourselves subconsciously, so as to avoid the unthinkable shame and sense of failure when we produce something decidedly mediocre.

I think I need to get over myself and write.

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