A Quote by Quiara Alegria Hudes
The best way for me to procrastinate as a writer is research.
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Everyone procrastinates. The difference between high performers and low performers is largely determined by what they choose to procrastinate on. Since you must procrastinate anyway, decide today to procrastinate on low-value activities.
I don't procrastinate because I love the English language and the process of storytelling, and I'm always curious to see what will come to me next. If you procrastinate a lot, you might be one who loves having written, but doesn't so much like writing.
I have a strong work ethic, yet I'm incredibly lazy as well. The problem with being a writer is that everything you do can be called research. Sitting in the pub is research. Reading the newspaper can be research.
The fact is that you can't do everything that you have to do. You have to procrastinate on something. Therefore, procrastinate on small tasks.
If you ask me, reincarnation is just another way to procrastinate.
Does research get in the way of the story? It certainly can. Anything can, given that as writers we're all geniuses at procrastination. But mostly research teaches me about the world. Which often shows me the way, in terms of the story.
That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.
The best way to do research is to make a radical assumption and then assume it's true. For me, I use the assumption that object oriented programming is the way to go.
Being pregnant taught me how to be a better writer. It was a lesson in negative capability and surrendering to necessity. Suddenly, my body instinctually yielded to the needs of this growing being, and I had no choice but to embrace what was happening and all that lay ahead, even if I was afraid and uncertain. So, while being a parent has made writing more challenging, it has also made being a writer more certain. There's no room to procrastinate; there is to time for fear.
I felt like I was a writer, and I just thought filmmaking was the best way for me to express that, because it allows me to embrace the visual world that I love. It's allows me to interact with people, to be more social than fiction or poetry, and it felt like the right way for me to tell the stories that felt pressing to me.
There is no last word in research, and that includes climate research. It's never the truth that scientists offer, but only our best possible approximation of reality. But that often gets forgotten in the way the public perceives and describes our work.
The best piece of advice I ever received about being a writer came from my brother Lee. I was just starting out and he told me that if I wanted to have a long career, I had to be versatile, that I shouldn't just think of myself in one way, because there would come a time when maybe that one thing wasn't working out for me - and I'd still want to earn a living as a writer.
The notion of a writer sitting in a library doing research isn't what I want. The research I love doing isn't found in a book. It's what it feels like to rappel down the side of a building; to train with a SWAT team; to hold a human brain in your hands; or to dive for pirate treasure. Those are things I've done to research my stories.
From the moment I wrote 'Leaf Storm' I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.
I've pursued a lifetime in the research on the social determinants of health and more recently been packaging not just my research but global research on this topic in a way that I hope will influence policy.
My best experience as a writer was working with Michael Ondaatje. He let me dismantle his novel, reimagine it, and still had dinner with me and gave me good notes. But the best thing about writing has been the writer's life, the sense of being expressed, the ownership of the day, the entirely specious sense of freedom we have, however slave we are to some boss or other. I wouldn't trade it for any other life.
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