I used to be a great writer. That is to say, I used to do all the things a writer is supposed to do, practice all the “good habits” laid out in this issue of Revisions. When I was in high school, I was the model student; if a paper was due Friday, I started it Monday. In college, I wrote a poem the moment an idea struck me. I sat in coffee shops free-writing. I filled notebooks. I was collegiate cliché, complete with hardcover journals and an earnest look in my eye. But something has changed for me, and now, after twenty-five years of being a student in one capacity or another, I have perfected a new, stranger art: procrastination. If a paper is due Friday, I start it the following week. If I have an idea for a poem, I turn on the TV and try to forget about it. As the stakes of production have gotten higher, as the isolation of writing has intensified, I have become a bad writer.

I always have the best intentions of getting work done. After all, I committed myself to a life of writing, so on some level I do want to produce. I make up schedules and lists and sign up for workshops, but when it comes to the moment of actual writing I find a way out. How could I possibly work, when there are so many other important things to get done: don’t I have to read every article in the New York Times to be a fit member of society? If I don’t watch that episode of Law and Order, who will? People, that can of Pringles isn’t going to devour itself! But to be a great procrastinator, one must understand that distraction need not come from external stimuli. You can disconnect from the Internet, throw out the TV, isolate yourself in a quiet office, but there is no escaping your own mind. I can’t number the hours I’ve spent in a library, nothing but a pad and paper in front of me, obsessing over questions like what will I have for dinner? Do I hate Coldplay, or do I love them? Why didn’t I listen to my mother and just go to law school? I’ve hung around enough writers to know that I’m supposed to get past my own thoughts by writing them down, writing anything down, heed the advice “just write.” But if that blank piece of paper is terrifying, it can’t compare to the terror of a completed work.

You will rarely hear an English professor admit this, but writing is a terrible burden. It’s lonely, thankless work that produces the worst kind of anxiety and self-doubt. There is always a point in the writing process when the writer understands this might fail. What failure means depends on the piece: maybe the work will earn a bad grade, or fail to get published, or simply not accomplish what the writer intended. For me, and I suspect for other great procrastinators, this threat of failure is intolerable. If I put everything into my writing and it fails, doesn’t that mean at my very core I, too, am a failure? When questions like this are spoken aloud, it’s easy to dismiss them as useless, self-indulgent, crazy. But for the writer sitting alone in front of the computer, without any contact with the outside world, these questions can loom large. Writers are notoriously self-obsessed, but I think few people realize how much of that self-obsession is based on self-loathing.

Back when I was a good writer, I forced others to take on some of the writer’s burden. Every time I wrote a paper in high school, I made my mother sit on my bed while I read it out loud to her. She would stare off into space, clearly bored to distraction, while I would essentially read aloud to myself. When I finished she would nod, say, “Great. Do you want me to check the punctuation?” At this point, I would usually throw a fit and scream, “Great? Don’t you see, the conclusion doesn’t accurately reflect my larger point! This is terrible! I hate myself!” My mother’s answer was always the same. “So fix it.” For some reason, I found this ritual incredibly soothing. On those nights my mother, in the great tradition of mothers, showed me that I didn’t have to sit alone with my doubts.

When I got to college, I started to email my papers to my mother. To her credit, she would read some of them, but her comments were less than helpful. “I don’t understand a word of this. What is Phallocentrism, and why are you so obsessed with it?” I had to find others to help me out. Because I lived on campus, I was surrounded by friends going through the same academic trials. We could write papers side-by-side, in dorm rooms or computer labs, all night long. We could go get snacks at two in the morning, complain about how hard it was to write five pages on a book we hadn’t read. When I got to that inevitable point in the process where I begin to think, this essay is the worst piece of shit anybody has ever written, I had good friends on hand to advise me. “Just finish it,” they would say. “Get it done. I’m sure it’s fine.” Then I could throw my fit: “Don’t you see, the conclusion doesn’t accurately reflect my larger point! I hate myself!” My friends’ answer was always the same. “Who cares? Just hand it in, and then you can go home for Christmas break.”

This is not an advisory essay. I’m not here to tell you to find somebody to sit with you while you write, or to yell at your mother that you are a terrible writer (although you might want to try it; it’s oddly satisfying). I point to these experiences because they show how dependent a writer is on contact with the world outside of herself, outside her work, outside her fears. I believe that the procrastinator’s reaching out for distraction is a way to reconnect to that outside world and, in so doing, avoid confronting the potential for failure that is always part of writing. So-called low-stakes writing, like freewriting, is supposed to help us get past our hang-ups, but what happens when you have hang-ups about freewriting? All writing has some stakes. Which is why, no matter how many great tips you can get from great writers, there is no easy out for the procrastinator.

I am beginning to think that the only way out of my patterns of procrastination is to regress a little. When I was an earnest college student, I truly believed that completing my work was worth all the trouble, all the self-doubt, all the fear. Being a great writer requires some amount of faith that whatever you are writing, that the very act of writing itself, is worth failing over. Before I became a lonely graduate student, desperate for love and money, I had this faith, most likely because I had people with whom I could share the act of writing. When I wrote, I saw beyond the page people who believed in me and valued my ideas; now when I write I see only judgmental committees who will never publish my work or offer me a job. Perhaps I will only become a good writer when I can, again, look beyond the possibility of failure and remind myself that there are so many other writers out there who believe, as I must somewhere deep down, that writing in and of itself is a worthwhile endeavor, even if, in the end, it fails.