Waste Time

I give you permission

Part of my writing practice is to waste time. I’m never not going to waste time, so I built it into my day. “Dick around for 1-2 hours” is in my planner. This way I don’t get mad at myself, which takes up all my energy until I’m too exhausted and enraged to write a word. 

The very good writer Natalia Ginzburg wrote of herself, “I am very lazy, and if I want to finish anything it is absolutely essential that I spend hours stretched out on the sofa.” 

Do you need to spend hours on the sofa? Do you need to nap every single day, sometimes twice? I give you permission. Sometimes I have to take a nap after I wake up. 

Sometimes I “have to” watch TV until I feel the feelings I need to write. I watch shows about sports teams (not actual sports) or dance squads or journalists or tech start-ups or vampire slayers who fight fights they can’t win but fight them anyway.

Sometimes I “must” scroll and scroll until I face-plant into the screen and feel so guilty that I can’t not write, to assuage my guilt. 

Sometimes I date straightwhitecismen.

And what is a “waste of time”? There are at least two kinds:

1. Writing garbage, which isn’t a waste of time but a part of writing anything. “Time wasted,” whether it’s hours or months or years, also means getting space/distance from your work and perspective on your experience.

2. Looking up “successful” people to whom to compare yourself, which is an actual waste of time.  

Waste the first. And keep wasting it, however you like. You must do it. You have to. You need it.

How do you waste time? I’m looking for more ways.

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Next on Tragedy Plus Time:

How to sit in a chair (productivity hacks)

How to get unstuck

An 8-part series on rejection

A shallow dive into medical gaslighting

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Waste time the right way in my upcoming seminar:

How to Write a Tragicomic Memoir

• October 8th (Sunday)

• 2-5pm EST

• Online, via Writing Workshops

Learn to make readers laugh while RIPPING OUT THEIR HEARTS in a full-length sad, funny book about yourself.

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ICYMI: I’m Elissa Bassist, and I teach short conceptual humor/satire writing, funny personal essays, tragicomic memoir, emotional emails, and that’s it. I teach in person and online at The New School, 92NY, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Writing Workshops, and elsewhere. I founded and edit the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus, and I wrote the award-deserving book Hysterical. I am probably my therapist’s favorite.

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