How to not write
Not writing is a lot easier than writing is. I should know. I’m fairly practiced at both.
Most writing projects are pretty easy to get a handle on, but some, for reasons I can’t pin down, are like greased pigs that you can’t get a firm hold on. It’s not that they’re difficult, really. It’s that they’re profoundly uncompelling.
Faced with this ugly fact, anyone who is on the hook to generate prose should have a routine for not writing. For those of you aspiring not to write, I’ll offer you my list for how not to do it:
Step 1: Read the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is a fine paper–-the world’s best. It’s also a great way to waste time and goof off while being nominally productive. Few would question a professional’s WSJ reading time as a frivolity, but that’s what it is, for the most part.
Step 2: Coffee. A coffee break is always a great way to avoid the keyboard. You can claim you’re “collecting your thoughts” or engaging in “creative thinking.” Actually, you’re just feeding your unhealthy caffeine addiction and leching at the chicks.
Step 3: Correspondence. E-mail and letters are great ways to act like you’re getting something done, when in essence you’re not doing anything productive at all. There’s a conspiracy at work here, since your pals have play the same game or you’d have nobody to correspond with. Happily, we all play it. Ninety percent of the correspondence that I generate is directly attributable to important writing that I’m not doing.
Step 4: Web surfing. If this can’t eat up time faster than a fat woman emptying a salad bar, nothing can. Problem is, the web loses its sizzle after a while, and even recreational use can begin to seem like–oh no!–actual work.
Step 5: A walk through Garapan. There’s nothing in Garapan worth seeing, let alone walking to, but you can always tell yourself that you’re doing an eyeball survey of the retail and tourist trade.
If the hookers all run up to you, call you by your first name, inquire about the wife and kids, and ask if you found that earing they lost, you can consider yourself either an incorrigible creep, or an adept market researcher.
Step 6: Car washing. I never, ever wash my car. But I make preparations to wash it all the time. The first step is to hunt down a cold beer, as a sound medical precaution against the tropical heat. Then you’ve got to hunt down a bucket, sponge, car soap…and, hopefully, by this time you’ve brainstormed another diversion to keep you away from the keyboard, and from the car.
Step 7: Talk about writing. If you’re a writer with flair, people will want to talk to you all the time about writing, which is usually as inviting as being the massage boy at a leper colony. But if you’re on a serious avoiding writing binge, then talking about writing is a great way to avoid doing it. Pontificate on your latest theories on adverbs. Pick a verb you hate and defend its non-use. Explain why dictionaries are a mere crutch for uncreative spellers. Then congratulate yourself on being such a low grade schmuck, since talking about writing is obscenely boring.
And there you have it, my friends, the definitive guide to not writing…you can thank me later, but not now. I’ve got to wash the car.
Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. “Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com”
