Procrastination: Ten Foolproof Protocols

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  1. Listen to all of Krista Tippet’s On Being podcasts, including the unedited versions, starting in 2001.

  2. Don’t type a word until Nicole Aragi agrees to be your literary agent.

  3. Get a real job. Whatever that is.

  4. Tell friends, strangers, the dude skateboarding down the street, your barista, that you’re writing a novel. For me, the more people I tell, the less likely it is that I’ll write a word. Plus it’ll save the heartache when the draft’s done and no one wants to read it anyway. And who needs heartache?

  5. Get dramatic: smash your hard drive and delete your iCloud account.

  6. Tell your accountant you want to be a full-time novelist. He’ll make procrastination real easy for you.

  7. Join a writers’ group that happens to have Khaled Hosseini as one of the participants. (True story.)

  8. Subscribe to every writing blog out there. Too much advice will bring about full-blown inertia and/or an extended time out in a padded room.

  9. Decide to renovate. Studies have shown that writing novels will not get you a marble bench top and parquetry floors. Not in this lifetime.

  10. Take up recreational drug use. (Hang on, that kinda worked for Hunter S Thompson.)