Archive for the ‘truman capote’ tag
Procrastination vs. Writer’s Block #
Jessica Winters explores how the two differ, and finds they’re mostly the same. Except, maybe, for this:
Maybe it’s the “might” factor that allows us finally to draw a line between procrastination and writer’s block. A block is thick, insurmountable, cast in stone, “as impenetrable as the Great Pyramid,” in Clarke’s words. Procrastination is a more pliant creature. When we defer a challenge until a hazy, ill-defined “later,” one might say that we devalue future time and belittle our circumstances in it; but you could also say that we are irrationally exuberant about the future—it becomes an ascetic, distraction-free idyll where all appetites have been permanently gratified, where minutes stretch out as luxuriously as hours, where all our creative prayers are answered.
Also of note, Ben Zimmer’s exploration of from whence the word came.