These 4 Bad Writing Habits Might Actually Be Your Greatest Writing Strengths

 Get free life strategies for writers in your email each week.

Your greatest strengths can sometimes be your worst faults, according to two recent books. Fear Your Strengths: What You are Best at Could Be Your Biggest Problem by Robert Kaiser and Robert Kaplan  and Tipping Sacred Cows: Kick the Bad Work Habits that Masquerade as Virtues by Jake Breeden claim that assets like confidence, humility, and focus can easily become bullying, timidity, and tunnel vision. Breeden points out that we sometimes buy into a “script” that defines the perfect mother, husband, boss, or employee, then stick with it even when it isn’t working. (For more discussion, see Mary Loftus’s essay in Psychology Today.)

But can the opposite happen as well? Can the habits we think of as flaws actually be strengths? Absolutely!

Many writers struggle with behaviors they consider weaknesses but can’t seem to change. When we’re beating ourselves up over our tendency to put things off or inability to focus, perhaps we should ask ourselves why those habits are so hard to break. It may be because they’re exactly what we need to be doing. Here are four common problems writers often feel guilty about—and why they might not be so bad after all.

Lack of organization.

In your imagination, you may have an image of a perfectly organized life. In this picture, your desk is clear, except for a laptop, a pad of lined paper, and two sharpened pencils. A neatly written list of the day’s tasks is tacked to a bulletin board over your desk, and the spotless room is lined with shelves containing efficiently stored supplies and books arranged by topic.

If your writing space looks less like this fantasy and more like a band of thugs just ransacked it in search for valuables hidden among your pile of old rubber bands, you are not alone. Few of us have such perfectly organized spaces—or lives. Yet, we have been sold the notion that orderliness is not merely valuable, but necessary for success.

In A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman argue that neatness comes at a cost. Organizing is time consuming and stressful, and it seldom yields better results than run-of-the-mill messiness. In fact, disorganized systems are often more efficient than organized ones. Is it really better to put your notes in a labelled folder filed in an alphabetized cabinet than to simply keep them in a box on your desk, where you can easily reach them?

Being disorganized allows for greater flexibility, fosters improvisation, and supports abundance. I learned this lesson years ago when, feeling overwhelmed by the number of tasks I had to perform, I set myself a rigid schedule for writing, grading papers, doing housework, and working out. I was sure the schedule would maximize my time, but problems arose immediately. Some days, I would cut short a burst of creativity because my writing time had elapsed and I had to move on to grading. Sometimes my class preparations took much less time than I had allotted, and sometimes they took far more. On days when I had a huge number of papers to grade, I would stop to vacuum—because that’s what my schedule said I should be doing. Organizing my time didn’t help my productivity: It interfered with it.

Disorder has another unexpected benefit: It allows for a kind of completeness that neatness eliminates. The writing space cluttered with boxes of scribbled notes, piles of books, collections of pictures, and assorted objects may seem untidy—but that space contains the stuff of inspiration and creativity. “Messy systems can comfortably tolerate an exhaustive array of diverse entities,” write Abrahamson and Freedman. “Neat systems tend to whittle away at the quantity and diversity of elements, eliminating some that would have proved useful or even critical.”

If you’ve been frustrated by attempts to organize that fall apart after a few days, perhaps better organization isn’t what you need. Maybe what you need is to accept your messiness, embrace it, and start to see its benefits.

Procrastination. 

If efficiency experts were to create a modern list of the seven deadly sins, procrastination would surely be near the top. Putting work off until later is generally thought of as the result of poor work habits and laziness—or perhaps anxiety and depression.

Yet, almost everyone procrastinates. In his research for The Procrastination Equation psychologist Piers Steel found that 95 % of the 24,000 people he interviewed admitted to procrastinating at least some of the time. I can’t help thinking that percentage would be even higher if he’d  interviewed only writers.

But procrastination, like messiness, has benefits. In The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing, philosopher John Perry introduces the phrase “structured procrastination.” He claims that people who put things off often end up getting a lot done—they just do it in their own time. 

According to productivity blogger Kayla Albert, procrastination cuts down on busywork by setting aside unnecessary tasks. It allows us to rest, so that when we get back to work, we do it energetically. It also cuts down on frustration and gives us time to plan ahead. 

Procrastination also offers us the space to clarify issues and think of solutions. I have often found that, if my writing is slow or stuck, the worst thing I can do is try to force myself through it. It works much better if I put it off for awhile. Virtually always, when I do start writing, I know exactly what I need to do. “Walking away from a task in order to allow an idea or solution to come to you organically can, in the end, be significantly more productive than trying to pull something out of thin air,” writes Albert. In other words, procrastination isn’t necessarily laziness: it may be an essential part of the writing process.

Confusion

I don’t believe I’ve ever taught a writing class in which I didn’t have at least two or three students come to me overcome with frustration because they were confused about their essays or stories. I always tell them the same thing: Confusion is good. Embrace it.  

Clarity is another one of those overrated “virtues” that are touted in the life-management literature. It seems you can’t do anything—raise a family, follow a spiritual path, build a business, or write a novel—unless you have a crystal clear vision of what you’re going to do before you do it. This sounds good, but it makes virtually no sense on a practical level.

The touters of clarity never seem to ask where that lucidity comes from, or what precedes it. In fact, the only way you can arrive at clarity is through confusion. “Confusion precedes breakthrough,” writes Dan Rockwell on the Leadership Freak blog. “Pushing confusion away pushes progress away.” You have to be in a state of chaos and murkiness first and work in that state for awhile before things clear up. For writers, that clarity often doesn’t come until they are finished with a project. It seldom comes ahead of time.

Psychologist Sidney D’Mello goes so far as to argue that schools should foster confusion in students. According to D’Mello the “cognitive disequilibrium” we experience when we’re confused forces us to reflect and analyze. That, he argues, leads to deep, complex learning.

As uncomfortable as it may feel, confusion is motivating, stimulating, and inspirational. It isn’t merely all right to be confused during the writing process—for many writers, it’s necessary.

Lack of focus.

Once in a blue moon, I find myself so engaged in my writing, I forget about everything else. Time passes, the sun sets, the cats meow for dinner, and I hardly notice. My thoughts are trained on the page, and that’s all that seems to exist. Those times, however, are rare. More often, my mind wanders here, there, and everywhere else when I’m writing. I want to focus, but sometimes it just doesn’t happen.

Apparently, I’m not alone. Harvard researchers Daniel Gilbert and Matthew A. Killingsworth found that most people let their minds wander almost 50% of the time. The only activity that people seemed able to consistently focus on was—not surprisingly—love making. 

“In a culture obsessed with efficiency, mind-wandering is often derided as useless—the kind of thinking we rely on when we don’t really want to think,” writes Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker

But, once again, conventional wisdom may have it all wrong. As early as 1975, Yale psychologist Jerome L. Singer published The Inner World of Daydreaming  in which he described “positive constructive daydreaming”—a form of mind-wandering essential to creativity. More recently, research by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler shows that allowing people to daydream helped them come up with solutions. As Lerher puts it, “whenever we are slightly bored…we begin exploring our own associations, contemplating counterfactuals and fictive scenarios that only exist within the head.” (An interesting aside: To induce daydreaming, Schooler had undergraduates read long passages from Tolstoy—which made them immediately zone out.)

The idea that we get writing done only when we’re consciously focused on it is simply not true. When our focus fades, shifts, and wanders off to other things, it’s often because our subconscious needs time to work. Instead of fighting to maintain focus, you might be better off allowing your mind to wander.

Of course, any of these habits can become problems—sometimes serious ones—if they go too far. If you are so disorganized you spend half your time looking for things, procrastinate to the point that you never get to that story, or feel so confused and out of focus that your ability to function is continually impaired, some serious change is in order. But, for the most part, the disorganization, procrastination, confusion, and lack of focus we writers experience don’t stem from laziness or poor work habits.They are part of the creative process and, despite what we may have learned about consistent work and neat desks, easing up on ourselves may be the best thing we can do for our writing.

[simple_contact_form]