All week, Slate has been running a series of articles on the topic of procrastination, and Jessica Winter has contributed a compelling piece about authors who were famous procrastinators, notably Truman Capote and Ralph Ellison.
There’s a heartbreaking moment in Gerald Clarke’s biography Capote when the writer, having finally completed the debilitating process of writing In Cold Blood in 1965, waxes optimistic about his next masterpiece: a novel he was calling Answered Prayers. “Oh, how easy it’ll be by comparison!” Capote exclaimed. “It’s all in my head.”
That may have been true. But upon his death in 1984, after years of public promises, revised delivery dates, and the ravages of alcoholism, Capote had managed to publish only snippets of his long-promised epic—and one of them was the notorious “La Côte Basque,” which savagely lampooned his social circle and alienated him from some of his dearest friends. In the American annals of famously attenuated literary careers, Capote is perhaps surpassed only by Ralph Ellison, who worked for nearly 40 years on his second novel—the follow-up to his phenomenally successful 1952 debut, Invisible Man—only to leave it incomplete when he died in 1994.
In their sustained anticlimaxes, Capote’s and Ellison’s writing lives raise a perplexing question: What is the difference between severe procrastination and writer’s block? Are they part of one continuum, like a Möbius strip? Were Capote and Ellison truly blocked, or did they merely delay so long that they ran out of time?
A good companion piece would be a write-up on those who have been prolific but might have benefited career-wise from some decent procrastination skills.
Sometimes (often) what we think of as procrastination turns out to be to our advantage. This is the case when we think we have to pursue tasks, projects, responsibilities that, for us, turn out to be (or be toward) the wrong goals, or it’s the wrong time, or we don’t have all the information we need in order to move forward (hence, it would be foolhardy to do so).
We spend a lot of time, as well as physical, mental, and emotional effort, on what, with closer examination, are poor uses of those capacities and resources. There’s certainly destructive procrastination, and there are better ways of dealing with it than what most people attempt to use (discipline and will-power are over-rated). But there’s also productive procrastination, which more of would benefit from learning about and embracing.
For more info, check out http://www.Procrastivity.com.