The Deferral Hack

Photo by Djim Loic on Unsplash

After writing the piece Curiosity, Taxed, I felt that maybe it was too clean. Sometimes the voice that tells me to keep writing rather than follow this curiosity spark down a rabbit hole is actually right. Sometimes what I need to do is to keep writing. But I still firmly believe that sometimes I need to fall down the rabbit hole. So how do I tell which is which?

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer for that. When I follow the curiosity thread instead of writing, sometimes it leads to a good insight. But sometimes it leads to me “driving” on Google Maps for an hour instead of writing. When I clamp down on my curiosity, sometimes it leads to finishing a pivotal scene. But sometimes it leads to flat words and listlessness and throwing my hands up and saying, what was I thinking? I’m not a real writer.

But what often works in this last case is deferral rather than suppression. When I hear the voice in the back of my head saying this curiosity that ain’t working, if I’m in the middle of a writing session, I often choose deferral. I would mark the place where I feel like I want to know what the couple in the car sees out the window, and at a later session, I would totally do a Google Maps drive, which would inform my descriptions. Or when I get stuck on a particular scene, I would mark it “shenanigans ensue” or “character has a beautiful epiphany” and move on. It took a while to learn to trust future me to pick up that thread.

And that’s maybe the point. Learning to trust future me, figuring out a system that fits the way my curiosity works, that has been a skill. The deferral works for me because it’s a way to dodge this question I don’t have an answer to: do I follow the curiosity or not? Usually, a few days (or months sometimes) down the road, I’ll look at this markup and say, nah, that’s not actually important. But in the moment, I have no answer, and I rely on this skill I developed—not as a fiction writer in the last decade but through life. It applies to parenting (do I want to check why the sky is blue now or do I want to tell my five-year-old I don’t know?) and to my research work (wait what is this esoteric term they refer to in this academic paper?) and I’d bet you it applies to a bunch of work scenarios I’ve never been in. For me, it gives me time to figure out whether or not I can tell.