On this morning's The Writer's Almanac, Garrison Keillor quoted Paul Rudnick (Jeffrey, In & Out, The Stepford Wives): "As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write..."
At last, someone put it in writing. There is procrastination that puts off the task at hand but in a writer that same procrastination provides him with the raw materials whence springs creative inspiration. Deadlines put our backs against the wall. Then we scrounge amongst the material procrastination yielded for what a project requires. It is a great waste of time and so necessary for us to create. If only there were a machine that churns out great stuff, be those words or images or inventions, minute after minute with no pause but then we may not experience the god-like feeling when in the midst of implacable deadness appears this tiny thing that crumbles walls and cities, demolishes worlds, betrays us to that transcendent moment of creation when we fly past hope to the momentary summit of achievement.
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