Previously Published in TWUC (The Writers' Union of Canada) Newsletter
Writing at home is hard. It's, like, a focus problem. The path to the desk is paved with great distractions. There's that rental video due back so maybe you should watch it right now. The morning paper demands to be read because there's a political crisis you need to know about right now. Followed by answering e-mail, researching on the Net, brushing your dog's bicuspids while ostensibly waiting for your work-in-progress to boot up...

The list lengthens to include whatever you, a creative person, can get up to in avoidance of your writing. Any benefit-conferring activity using up writing time qualifies as procrastination and in fact, these are all low-level procrastination devices.

Why do you procrastinate? Procrastination works. It quickly produces a satisfying glow of shortterm accomplishment. Your writing, on the other hand, is gratification deferred, cubed. Books usually take years of steady effort to complete with a considerable wait after that for the warm runnies of publication. It's risky work too. There may never be a big payoff and possibly only pricks instead of kudos.

So your writing sits waiting on your desk, unable to offer you anything like the satisfaction of a load of laundry folded and put away, despite the lump of anxiety forming in your stomach at how little you've accomplished yet today, despite your intention and your talent.

The real problem is that your house is full of your personal life: the exercycle reminds you of how out of shape you are, the bottle of wine on the counter says you drink too much, the bills make you anxious about money and your partner's clothes and books piled up everywhere rub in that you're a bedhead shuffling around in a sweatshirt while Partner is out there in the real world making the big bucks.

Or maybe you're prosperous and terrific, trim and well-loved, so blissfully content with each day that you've come to suspect it's your happiness that hampers you, harder to let go of than misery in order to engage productively with your book.

So you go to your writing space and do all the right writing things. You make the decor as different from your living space as possible. You get self-assembling home office furniture from you-know-where, turn off the phone's ring, pull on your writer's fedora, and boot up the computer.

And it's still hard. You're still at home. The dog knows this too. He's pulling you towards the door with his black velvet eyes. You can't help thinking: if I only had a little room across town, and a bus ride, and a time clock to punch and a window looking out onto an alleyway or a birch grove, I'd write mounds.

Sure, you might, but for most of us that expense is out of the question. For most of us working at home is a necessity. Most of us have to make it work. We have no choice.

Realizing you have no choice makes starting in to work somewhat easier.You set your goal of two, three, or five pages a day, assuming that at least a few paragraphs will be keepers. A slow but steady accumulation over a year and you'll have a satisfying stack of pages.

But of course it's possible that, at the end of the month, you might look at those pages and find none of them particularly satisfying. If so, ask yourself, is this the writer or the depressed homebody who thinks that? Chances are, it's the latter. Chances are, there actually is some good stuff in that pile.

Writing often doesn't feel particularly enjoyable or easy. Writing at home can make it even less enjoyable. But if you have no choice, then onward you must go. No day must pass without writing, you vow. Unless you are a complete mediocrity, you're bound to create something salvageable from your stack of pages, even working at, say, fifty per cent of your potential. When you see what you've achieved and can feel the momentum, it becomes easier to push on to the finish line. Once over the halfway mark, the job begins to shrink. You're no longer daunted. You hardly notice where you're working but only that you are working, day after day.

Unless of course you're not. If none of the above sounds familiar or reflects at least some of your own experience, here may be something else impeding your creative life. The fears and misgivings that are all around you in the house really may be on a deeper level and about something else which would likely push you towards a crisis of some kind no matter where you worked.

Get outside and take a long walk, sit in the sunshine somewhere and decide once and for all if there truly is something big blocking you, something bigger than ordinary low-level procrastination. If there is, you may want to go get some help. Maybe what you have been avoiding isn't about writing but the big personal problem you need to address in order to free yourself up to write.

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