On the disease of Tomorrow, the tyranny of the urgent, and why thy quill gathers dust.
Good morrow, gentle readers.
I write to you from Stratford, where I have retreated these several weeks to finish the Scottish play. I was to have delivered it to the company by Michaelmas. It is now past Candlemas. Burbage sends letters. I do not open them.
This morning I rose with every intention of writing Act V. Instead, I reorganised my inkwells by colour, mended a doublet I have not worn since the plague year, and spent an hour watching a spider build a web in the window frame. The spider, I note, finished her project.
I know whereof I speak when I say that procrastination is not laziness. It is fear wearing the mask of busyness. The lazy man lies abed and feels nothing. The procrastinator rises early, works furiously at everything except the one thing that matters, and retires at night with a soul full of self-reproach and a desk full of organised inkwells.
I wrote once, in a play about a king who lost his crown through idleness: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.” Richard said this in prison. But you need not be imprisoned to feel the truth of it. You need only look at the gap between what you intended for your day and what you actually did with it.
That gap is where your life is leaking out.
My lord Burbage tells me I must write faster, for the public wants new entertainments. The public, he says, has a short memory and a shorter patience. I told him the public can hang. He reminded me that the public pays my rent. He has a point, the insufferable man.
But here is what I have observed in my years of writing for the stage: the urgent devours the important with the appetite of Falstaff at a banquet. There is always a theatre to repair, a patron to flatter, a boy actor whose voice is breaking at the worst possible moment. And amidst these clamourings, the play—the actual work, the thing that will outlast us all—waits quietly in the corner like a neglected child.
I suspect you know this feeling. You have your own Act V to write—some work of the heart, some labour that is yours alone—and yet the days fill themselves with lesser errands as if by sorcery.
I have tried remedies. I have tried rising before dawn, but I find that I am not a man improved by darkness. I have tried setting myself deadlines, but I am also the man who grants the extensions, which renders the entire exercise theatrical. I have tried guilt, but guilt is a poor craftsman—it can demolish a man’s spirit but it cannot build a single scene.
What works—when anything works—is this: I sit down. I pick up the quill. I write one line. Not a good line, necessarily. Often a terrible line. But the terrible line begets a less terrible line, and that line begets one that is almost passable, and before I know it, an hour has passed and I have a page, and the page has something alive in it that was not there when I sat down.
The secret is not discipline. The secret is beginning.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow—yes, it creeps. But it creeps whether you write or not. The page will be blank tomorrow too, unless you mark it today.
I must go. Burbage’s latest letter sits unopened on my desk, growing more furious by the hour. I can practically hear it breathing.
But first—one line. Just one. And then perhaps another.
The Scottish king awaits his ending. And unlike the rest of us, he shall get one.
Yours in perpetual tardiness,
Will
Stratford-upon-Avon
If this dispatch moved thee, consider buying me a coffee
Thy shilling keeps the inkwells full and Burbage at bay.
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The Muse Be Willing 