Work Ethic

I am lazy. 

Writing is hard work, and I make it harder by avoiding it and putting it off. I wait for inspiration like I wait to win the lottery: hopeful that something good will happen without ever taking action(including never buying a ticket). 

But inspiration doesn’t strike like lighting. It doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s tiny, like the turn of a phrase. It’s the thing you glance at, then have to look again. It’s a small, surprising detail, and it doesn’t wait for you to sit and write it down. It can be gone before you even catch it, a fleeting moment of something that flees before you know to reach for it.

I have let countless moments of inspiration slip away through sheer laziness. Often, I make a mental note to make note of it later, but after several hours, all I remember is that I was supposed to remember something. Even worse, I remember the something, but not the spark of it: the momentary understanding of why it is interesting or worth exploring. The metaphor that can be mined, the deeper realization behind it. Suddenly, inspiration sits like a lump in the form of a word, an image, an event, a simile.

Because I’m lazy.

My laziness manifests itself in my inability to start something new. I find it much easier to obsess over pieces that are several years old, rehashed to the point of being blind and deaf to the big picture of it. I dig in so deep to the tiny things that the large gets lost. I am never finished with anything. When I should be writing something new, I am going back over the same 20 poems, the same 20 short stories that I’ve clung to. 

Once every two months, a new short piece emerges from the haze of sloth that surrounds me. It, too, will never be done. It will weather over time under my endless revisions, small pieces getting chipped away until the essence of the thing is lost to me.

My longer projects, however, sit untouched. Their revision is far too big a task to be tackled in one or two sittings, and therefore, I avoid them. A screenplay and a novel percolate constantly, and new notes are added for background, but no structure is considered, no new prose is written.

All of this because I’m a lazy asshole.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got excuses: Teaching and grading, reading endless entries for this magazine, being a mentor, conducting interviews, working a menial job, reading stories at a nursing home, exhaustion. It all sounds good until I consider all the time I’ve given to the things that aren’t included in the list above: hours in the office chatting with coworkers, evenings and nights spent out with friends, evenings and nights spent in with friends, hours-long skype conversations, endless Youtube spirals, Netflix and television viewing. 

There are always reasons we can give to not get work done. But if we’re serious about writing, we’re the people who look at both those lists as, ultimately, time wasted. Writing is the priority. It has to be. If it isn’t, there are plenty of dedicated people who will make different choices of what to do with their time, and they are the ones who will be worth reading.

So, if you’re lazy like me, consider that there are really two options: Either develop some self-discipline, quickly, or start looking for a new career. If you need me, I’ll be desperately scrambling to make better use of my time.

-Jake Little, Managing Editor