I’ve been meaning to write something about procrastination but keep putting it off.

There are a myriad of things to do in any day at any time. You have choices to make at every point and there is always one option that is easier than most of the others and this one option is rarely the best of the bunch. Take me, for instance, I would like to write fiction – nothing Earth-shattering, a few decent short stories are my only ambition at the moment. To do this I need to dedicate some time each day to writing (how long should it take to write a short story, for crying out loud!). This requires solitude and a degree of peace. So if I am not working my day job, cooking, spending time with my family, reading or sleeping, then I should be writing – no questions. That gives me about 1 ½ to 2 ½ hours a day when I should be writing.

So why don’t I write? Writing is what I state that I want to do and I have the time to do it. But I don’t write. I put it off, I discover other things to fill those hours – not things that are more important, but things that are easier to do, like watching TV or trawling through interweb detritus or writing some god awful blog or playing computer games or any of a number of other vacuous, pointless tasks. And the hours just fly by. We have so much choice now that there is always an easy option. Writing, I know, is never going to be an easy task so what can I do to make sure that it is chosen over all the ephemera? - ephemera that is always going to be easier and shinier. Why do I continue to procrastinate and avoid facing the one thing I profess to desire?

Perhaps it is fear. Perhaps I am just your ordinary coward. What I fear is not the discovery that writing demands hard work and dedication, I accept that already. No what I fear is that in working hard and in dedicating my few hours a day to writing, I discover that I was never destined to become a writer. That writing is not something I have in me and never will be. I will come to understand that I may as well sit myself down in front of that TV and let those images and that sound dull the pain as I let my life hurtle by. That those things that I dismiss as ephemeral distractions now become the best that I can hope for as I disappear from view.

Of course the irony is, if I don’t try to write, if I don’t face my fear, then I am damned anyway. I know that it is better to try and to fail than to procrastinate and inherit the failure anyway. Yet, if I procrastinate I will always have that dream that I could be a writer. Perhaps this is the real problem. I can live my banal existence with a dream to cling onto, like a life raft, but to sail this sea with no dreams would be the greatest horror of all.

Tartarus Central can be a gloomy place at times.