A friend once sent me a postcard which showed a cheerful looking typwriter and the inscription, "Writing... It beats doing the dishes".
Now, I really hate doing the dishes. The only aspect of the task that is pleasurable is finishing them. Leaving them there to dry on the rack. You don't put them away, of course, because then no one would know how virtuous you have been. They'd probably assume that you simply haven't bothered eating.
Finishing writing is good too. It means you can go out without feeling guilt. It means you get paid. But unlike the dishes, finishing writing rarely provides the same smug self-congratulations. There is no objective test of your achievement. Nothing as simple as the absence of encrusted food or tannin in the teacup. And while there is truth in the commonplace that writers are generally their own harshest critics, there is the dark flipside: just because you think that what you have written is the worst thing you have ever done, doesn't mean it isn't. Even the approval of your peers, your significant other, the director, the producer, the script editor, the story editor, the publisher and your mother, there still lurks the mosquito buzzing in your ear and telling you: "It's shit".
But I get ahead of myself. Finishing something is a doddle in comparison with the hardest part of any creative process. Starting It.
The composer Peter Sculthorpe tells of Russell Drysdale's anguish over Starting It. Drysdale couldn't paint until his studio was completely clean, completely tidy. After dealing with all the surfaces and rendering them virginally pure, he would finally get on his hands and knees and remove the dust from the cracks between the floorboards. And then he would put it back.
I have conducted a brief survey of my creative friends about their means of avoiding Starting It. The Sydney Morning Herald seems to feature prominently. Although there is universal agreement that the SMH is nowadays a light read, it appears to have a curious ability to expand in fascination in inverse proportion to the proximity of the deadline. Suddenly the Harbour frontage advertisements in the real estate section are rivetting, even though you are pushing it to scrape together next week's rent. Another favourite is the computer game, or, if you really like waving temptation in your own face, the internet. One eminent television writer admits to having become so smitten by the computer game of Monopoly, that she finally threw the floppy disk in the sink and ran hot water over it. A friend watches Rikki Lake on daytime television, needing her fix of poor, white trash screaming at each other, before she can confront the conflicts inside her computer. Another is compelled to re-read all her "How to Write the Perfect Screenplay" books until her deadline is grabbing her by the throat. Other people do the dishes first.
It is hard to start and hard to finish. The bit in between isn't always a breeze either. Writing is hard. Why do we do it? The most jaded of us might say that it's all we can do. It's as good a way as any of earning a living. But under the cynicism is, I think, a simple fact: we have something (many things) to say and a need and ability to express it. It is intensely personal, no matter how collaborative and shared the process. We are exposing ourselves in a way that few occupations demand. These characters and ideas are our own, and we are holding them up to the world for scrutiny. Scrutinise it does, because once your words are out in the world, they are public property.
Creative writers are not normal people. Think of ten, randomly, of your acquaintance. Weird or not? Weird. A recent article in Scientific American cited a study that suggested that while the expected rate in the general population of cyclothymia (a mild form of manic depression) is around 5%, amongst artists and writers it is around 52%. We have ten times the rate of depression and up to 18 times the rate of suicide. Literature is strewn with the works of manic depressive or depressive writers: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Hermann Hesse, Tennessee Williams, Ezra Pound...
The causes of depression and manic depression are matters of intense debate. There are environmental triggers, familial tendencies, neurotransmitter imbalances. As we move from the psychology of the seventies to the neurobiology of the nineties, consensus seems to be falling on the side of nature rather than nurture. So, it is reasonable to conclude that a predisposition to such conditions is present in many who chose writing as a career. Many factors could be at work here. Perhaps the solitudinous nature of writing appeals. But I would suggest that it is the very intensity of experience that goes with these swooping emotions that leads to the need for a means of expression. They cannot be squeezed comfortably into a career with the bank.
The other side of the chicken and egg debate is equally compelling. Weeks hidden away in your room with your characters conversing loudly in your head; the highs of the times when it flows so fast you can scarcely type quickly enough to catch it; the lows when you stare at the empty page and nothing happens ("a terrible whiteness", poet Elizabeth Smart called it); the breathtaking insensitivity of certain producers when finally you hand your baby over for ritual sacrifice. It all sounds like a training course in Learning to be a Manic Depressive.
Is it any wonder that so many writers baulk at Starting It?
But I have now discovered the ultimate act of procrastination. I call it meta-procrastination. What you do is this. Ring the editor of Viewpoint. Tell him that you want to write an article on procrastination. And then deliver late.