A writer has to wrestle with many internal obstacles but procrastination is the demon of choice for most of us. I write; I work with writers. The more I do both, the more sympathy I have with procrastination, hesitation, indecision and oh my dear friend, displacement activity.

Watching others go through the procrastination process so familiar to me, I see clearly why we do this. Our dearest wish is to be brilliant and our deepest fear is that we are banal.  Avoiding completing the work and then, oh hell, showing it to someone, means avoiding finding out the terrible truth, that I have no talent. I felt a bit sick even typing that. Delete, delete. Except I am committed to truth in this blog.

Even experienced writers say they still go through this, thinking their success so far has been a fluke and this latest catastrophe will expose them.

Of course, there are a few robust souls who believe in themselves and their talent. They are usually very successful, inspiring and likable but I wouldn’t say compassion is a leading characteristic with them. In my field, film-making, they are more likely to be directors than writers.

There are fragile types who never manage to finish, or if they do, they hide their work away, for fear of its being judged harshly or if they do find the courage to show it to someone, they collapse at the first sign of criticism.

Then there are the rest of us; we don’t think of ourselves as geniuses (except in secret; we are still hoping we might be) but we believe if we keep working at our craft we might be a part of making something beautiful and meaningful and moving some day.

So we push through the unworthiness and keep going. Or we start a blog. When there are 4,500 words due for a newspaper feature in two days.