procrastinate

It has nothing to do with being lazy or busy or distracted.

It’s common to put off your goal of writing a memoir either before or after you’ve started writing it. We beat ourselves up for this, annoyed that we can’t just sit down and write. But it’s not that we’re lazy. And, yes, we’re all busy and get distracted by everything, but we also prioritize and can find time. I hope looking at why memoir authors procrastinate will either motivate you to stay on task or help you at least to forgive yourself for periodically abandoning the project.

Writing a Memoir is Like Everything Else You Do

It’s not just writing; we procrastinate all tasks. And writing can really be a challenge. The thing with procrastination is that it quickly becomes an “out of sight, out of mind” condition. First you tell yourself that you’ll start on Monday or the first of the month or after the holidays. But once you’ve delayed it, you give yourself permission to put it off again, when Monday or whatever targeted date arrives.

Or if you’ve started your memoir and you pause, you get out of your writing habit. Like any habit, then it takes effort to get back into the swing.

Writing a Memoir is Like Nothing Else You do

Writing is hard, but you’ve written before, at least in school. The new aspect is your subject matter. Maybe you’ve put yourself into previous work—perhaps you’ve written an opinion piece or based an essay on a personal experience—but this book reveals so much about your life that you may not have even thought through, much less written about for others to read.

With a memoir, you’re running head first into obstacles thrown by two bullies—general writer’s block and naked exposure. When one’s not bombarding you, the other one is.

A Writer’s Procrastination

All writing projects carry inherent roadblocks:

• How to begin your story? You may get so obsessed over grabbing the reader with a catchy lede that you can’t move on until you’re satisfied with your opening paragraph. This can be true whether you’re writing an article, essay or book. It’s a trap, and all you have to do is step around it. Start somewhere in the middle, with a story you remember well. Keep adding stories, and eventually you’re likely to intuitively know how to begin.
• Structure. How to begin an article, story or book is just one of the decisions in the bigger picture of how to structure the piece. If you’re telling a story, do you go chronologically, jump back and forth, or start with a pivotal event and then go back and trace the roots before picking up where the event left off? Considering your structure also opens the doors to form. Should you craft your writing as a diary? Even a poem? Should you write in present tense or past tense?
• Research. Nothing stops creativity in its tracks like finding yourself at a loss for facts. You may tell yourself that you’ll continue that chapter as soon as you have time to interview a key person, get access to some public records, read a history book, find an old map/telephone book/Yellow Pages, or get hold of whatever source you need to consult to provide detail or accuracy. You have two choices: put that chapter aside but keep writing from a different point in time, or start on the research right away. It’s harder to go back to it after you’ve lost momentum and still haven’t done the necessary research.
• Edits. Being unhappy with some part of what you’ve already written is another hurdle writers easily trip over. Until you fix this or that, what you want to write next won’t have enough background to make sense, or the opposite—it will be somewhat repetitive. Or you’re just feeling that the writing isn’t that good and you should improve it before starting the next chapter. But writing a flawed first draft is absolutely permissible. I confess that this issue often slows me down. I want to be satisfied with the part that’s done, and sometimes I edit it over and over before I continue. That’s okay, too, as long as, at some point, you get yourself to accept that it’s in good enough shape to move past it.
• Insecurity/imposter syndrome. Before you start writing, and periodically as you write, your insecure side may be needling you about not being a good enough writer. You’re either writing this or you’re not. Make up your mind, and stick with it! Worry about how good it is after you finish. At least then you’ll have fulfilled your promise to yourself to write it.
• How to end? If you get to the ending, know that finishing a piece of writing is easier than starting it. But in any dynamic writing, you can be unsure of whether you should wait and see what happens next. Or you may not know how much to include. So you put the writing aside again, hoping to come to terms with an ending. That’s when insecurity can creep back in to sabotage your project and keep you from going back to it at all.

A Memoir Author’s Additional Procrastination

With all of the circumstances that can derail any kind of writing, it’s not a surprise that a memoir carries even more threats to completion. Memoir authors specifically also have to deal with:

• PTSD. Many memoirs focus on a traumatic event. The only way to write about trauma, at least when you’re writing it out for the first time, is to more or less relive it. You have to gear up for that, and it’s understandable when you let days or months pass before getting yourself to go through that. Or you start, and then the next time you try to pick it up again you just can’t. This is hard, and you have to really commit to getting it done, but then it’s often cathartic and the event stops haunting you.
• Simple sadness. Maybe you’re humming along fine until you reach the part about your mother’s death, and you are just never in the mood to write about that. Again, it’s having to relive something that was difficult the first time.
• Second thoughts. A lot of memoir authors struggle with whether to publish their life story. Even after starting the project, they may hit a point of delaying because they worry that their life isn’t interesting enough for anyone to want to read about it, or that what they’re writing about will hurt the feelings of some of the people in their life, or that some of those people may even take legal action against them. They don’t know the first thing about getting a book published and worry about that process. People who write about a happy life may start to worry that they’re jinxing their own chance for joy in the future—as soon as you proclaim you’ve had a great life, something bad happens—and that can stop them from finishing the work.

So you may be insecure or worried or traumatized, but you’re not lazy! Give yourself a break, identify what’s keeping you from finishing your memoir, and dive back in.