Question: How do I get over my procrastination and fear of failure in order to meet my deadlines?

I’m a big believer in overcoming dread and procrastination by just breaking everything down into small steps, so my goal was just for 15 minutes every day to pick up a guitar and just play around for a little while. If you come up with something, great! If you don’t, when that 15 minutes is over you can get up and go do something else. You’ve done your job today.

And I love procrastinating, actually, because that pressure at the end really helps. A lot of the process happens without the gears crunching, too. If you know it’s happening and you know you’re putting it off, I find myself thinking about it in the back of my head but in a more romantic poetic way. It almost feels like the algorithm is engaged. Then when it comes time to harvest it, you go in there and be like, “So, what have you done?” Pick all the fruit.

I think I wrote more because it was what I shouldn’t be doing. I should’ve been looking harder for work, and I was procrastinating by writing. I did end up writing really quickly, but it was not a routine. It was very spastic.

One thing I do want to talk about that a lot of people don’t cover is how important it is for you to fail. You have to fail. Failure is more important than your success, so like, please fail, please. Fail happily. Because there’s a saying that goes, “Nobody has failed more times than the master.” And I think that’s very true. I encourage people to fail, please do, it’s so important.

I always followed my heart and I definitely never lost my enthusiasm. There’s the one quote from Churchill that I always think about, something like “success is what happens after an incredible accumulation of failures.”

Take risks. Be brave. Put yourself out there even if you’re worried it won’t work out. It often won’t. But the times where it doesn’t are actually more valuable internally than the times when it does work out, because failure is the best teacher. It is so dumb that societally we talk about “failure” in such negative terms. People who don’t fail don’t grow.

Often we’re the ones limiting ourselves through fear of failure or fear that we’re not going to fit other people’s expectations. But that’s in our heads.

Yeah, but there’s no way to know that without just fucking fail, fail, fail, fail, failing at it. I mean, failure is such a boring old trend now. Everybody knows that failure is the key to everything. But then what’s next? If we know that failure is the way to get anything done that feels good, then it’s about getting the space to imagine the actual utopia that follows it. So yes, fail, but also allow yourself to imagine what could come next—not the perfect world inside of this world, but the perfect world that seems impossible. That is the thing that I hope comes out of a million failures.

I’m good at knowing when to step away, and I’ve gotten good at knowing when to say something can wait until the next day. Part of this is because I’m really intense about deadlines. I take deadlines pretty seriously, much to the joy, I’m sure, of the editors who have to work with me. I view deadlines as getting stuff off my plate, so I can write a poem, read a poem, or read something else I love. That doesn’t mean I rush through deadlines. I take great care in the stuff I work on, but I do take deadlines seriously because for me, getting something off my plate and doing it well allows for me to put something else on my plate that I might really love discovering. I might find something new or find something exciting that I can put on my plate.

The thing that works best is having an ambitious deadline, because then there’s fear in my heart and I’m like, “Okay, I really have to do this.” There’s a kind of stress or anxiety that motivates. I make small checkpoints and have small goals. Every day when I come back to my studio, there’s at least a portion of the day that’s just about grinding out something that needs to be done. Right now I have hundreds and hundreds of these poetic little fragments of text that are populating this world, and I just need to get those into place. I want to try to get like 100 of these in place today. They should take me two or three hours, and then at least I have something.

I’m not the type of writer that is aligned and really locked in and my intention clear if I’m just trying to make a deadline as a writer.

I’m a very fearful and anxiety-ridden person. I feel like part of my life project has been walking up to things that freak me the fuck out and just doing them because otherwise I’d be mad at myself. That’s really important to me. I feel like that’s why I’m drawn to horror.

I think a big part of my process is about overcoming this social anxiety/inability to connect and communicate with other people in a normal way. So when I’m thinking about it like that, I’m considering how people are responding to my words. I’m seeing it as a way of me being able to communicate with people, maybe in a way that isn’t normally possible for me.

One of the most important things I kept telling myself once I started writing the book again was that I couldn’t be afraid of failing. I can’t. If I’m going to fail I want that failure to be spectacular. I want it to be big. I don’t to inch my way into it. I just want to push as far as I can and see what happens. If I fail I want to fail ambitiously, and not in some tepid way where I second-guessed myself to death.