How to avoid writing

Some people believe it’s difficult to avoid writing. That if you have a story to tell, it will burst forth from the tips of your finger and leap onto the page at the slightest encouragement.

I’m here to prove those people wrong. I’m here to prove that it’s possible to defer your most precious dream for years, decades, your entire working life, until it’s far too late to do anything about it.

I have personally managed to avoid writing for more than half my life already, and I’m here to tell you how you can do the same. If you follow my simple advice, you too can avoid doing the one thing that fills you with joy and vitality!

Blame your environment

Your first line of defense against writing is to blame your environment.

Complain about your chair, the height of your desk, the quality of your keyboard. If its loud, complain about the noise; if it’s quiet, complain about the lack thereof. Complain that the air conditioning is too hot or too cold, that there is too much or too little natural light in your workspace. When your friends invite you out to dinner, complain about having too many social obligations; if you don’t have friends, complain about being lonely.

You will never have the ideal conditions to write. Turn this fact to your advantage. Turn every minor discomfort into a reason for not doing your life’s work.

Blame your tools

The next technique is as versatile as it is enjoyable: blame your tools for your inability to write.

Tell yourself that you can’t possibly write that novel until you find a writing app that feels just right, an app with just the right features. Try as many apps as you get your hands on, then draw up comparison tables to ostensibly help you choose the correct one. Every time you find an app that meet your needs, find something to be annoyed about: an animation that feels “off”, a feature that doesn’t work on your smart fridge, lack of support for a file format from 1998 that you might want to use.

Never mind that Jane Austen wrote on sheets of coarse paper that she stitched together herself, making marks on it using a quill pen that was made with goose feathers and had to be periodically dipped in cheap ink. Who cares about Jane Austen? She wasn’t that good anyway. The moment you find the perfect writing app, the world will forget Jane Austen even existed.

The best thing about blaming your tools as an excuse is the sheer mileage you can get out of it. Not having the right software is just the beginning, you can continue to avoid work by endlessly tweaking the tools you already have. Change the font, try different window layouts, download endless plugins and extensions, spend an entire Tuesday learning a new programming language just so you can add a new button to the user interface.

If you’re clever, nobody will call you out on it. Everyone will congratulate you for being so dedicated to your craft. The internet is full of people who only ever write about writing apps. You, too, can be one of them.

Blame your writing process

When you’ve exhausted all excuses around tools, you can move on to the question of writing process, a series of perfectly calibrated mechanical actions that will take you from blank page to published work without taxing your brain. Wait, what’s that? You don’t have a writing process? Well, then you must take the time to develop one! Preferably by reading as much as you can about writing without doing any writing yourself.

An easy place to start is to read about the work habits of other writers. This is best done on the internet, where those habits will be presented without context, completely disconnected from the work those habits were developed to serve.

Once you’ve exhausted this near-infinite well of low-calorie information, move on to reading books about the craft of writing. Writers love to give advice about writing, especially when that advice is useless to everyone but the advice-giver. These books should keep you busy for a few years without bringing you any closer to writing anything worth reading.

And if it happens that you somehow manage to exhaust even this vast resource of non-information, you can always fall back on the one resource that is truly inexhaustible: podcasts and video essays about writing.

Remember: 2x speed is for people who want to do the work. You must live your life at 0.75x.

Take notes

While you’re devising the perfect writing process, take detailed notes on every piece of media you engage with. Did you know that you can double the time spent reading a book if you insist on rewriting everything the author says in your own words on a stack of index cards?

If you’re truly adventurous, build a Zettelkasten. Of all the techniques humanity has invented to prevent actual work from occurring, the Zettelkasten is the most ambitious, the most baroque, and the most effective.

I recommend keeping a copy of How to Take Smart Notes on your desk at all times. It’s a treasure trove of techniques that help create pointless busywork without yielding anything in the way of useful output.

Create busywork for yourself

Talking of busywork, here’s something familiar that’s employed by every schoolchild, bureaucrat, and project manager on the planet. Busywork creates a flurry of activity without resulting in anything worthwhile getting done, perfect for all of us who want to appear important and industrious without being either.

This one is easy: make elaborate plans for work you will never actually do. Make task lists, reorganize your notes, catalog all the books you want to read, clear your email inbox, pay your utility bills, update your operating system, clean up your phone contacts, rearrange your browser tabs, prune your photo gallery, and indulge in any other activity that involves moving information from one location to another.

The trick is to shuffle information around until it feels like it’s vaguely organized, without using it for anything that resembles real work. Type the words “personal knowledge management” into a search engine and watch the possibilities unfold.

Do research

You cannot be expected to write a novel about friendship unless you know everything there is to know about friendship, right? That would be absurd. Draw from personal experience? Pshaw, that’s for amateurs! Does a brain surgeon draw from personal experience? Does a rocket scientist draw from personal experience? Then why should a novelist be expected to draw from their personal experience of normal everyday human emotions?

Novelists must draw from years and years of difficult research and study. Books! Newspaper articles! Blog posts! Scientific papers! Gotta read ‘em all. How else are you going to give your readers a sense of verisimilitude?

The best part about doing research is that you don’t even have to read the material. You can spin your wheels for weeks, even months, doing research about the research you’re planning to do.

Make elaborate lists of everything there is to read about friendship, why you should read it, where to purchase it, which order to read it in, and who recommended it. Collect as much metadata as you possibly can. Make mind maps and spreadsheets, databases and infinite canvases. Don’t read the material, just read the text surrounding the material: reviews, meta-commentary, abstracts, Wikipedia articles, anything but the actual research material.

Stay in the shallows where it’s safe, away from the groping tentacles of success and creative fulfillment.

Journal

There will come a time when looking into the screen with your eyes glazed over will no longer suffice. The usual flurry of busywork will no longer suffice. Shuffling other people’s words from notes app to notes app will no longer suffice. You will want to type words into your computer, using your own ten fingers, produced by your own spongy brain.

There will come a time when you will want to at least feel like you’re writing, but of course without putting in the effort to write. You will want to appear, to any external observer, like you’re producing a great deal of work, but without having to shoulder the burden of producing any work at all.

This is when you begin keeping a diary. Call it something impressive, like morning pages or freewriting. If someone asks why you’re journaling, come up with a reason that makes you sound spiritual and enlightened. Journal every day for hours and hours, far more than is necessary or reasonable. Do this for a year, five years, a whole decade. Document every little minutia of your life. Tell yourself you’re collecting material for future stories. Try to ignore the fact that the only story you’re telling is the story of your refusal to do the work.

Do self-care

If all else fails, take a year long vacation from all your responsibilities, burning through the money you were saving for retirement. If anybody objects, use the magic words: self-care. That will shut everyone up.

At the end of the year, start over with a new creative pursuit, something that “feels more authentic”.

You, too, can successfully avoid writing

If you follow my advice, you can forever put off writing that thing you always wanted to write! Before you know it, you will be old and feeble and close to death, having accomplished nothing, leaving behind hundreds of megabytes of rough notes half-filled with half-thunk half-thoughts.

If you set your mind to it, you can avoid writing forever. Even if it’s the only thing you’ve ever wanted to do.