"An obvious essential in establishing a regular habit of writing is involvement. Talk and good intentions, in themselves, rarely build strong habits of writing." (108)
I feel like Boice is talking directly to me (or all college students) here. Procrastination is the worst part of writing. We always say what we will do and how well we will do it, but when does it actually get done? When does the talking stop and the writing start? Boice offers four steps to fixing this. First, motivate yourself. He suggests to make a chart of your daily compliance and activity. Second, pressure yourself to stick to scheduled times for writing with the help of a social contract. I actually like this step. I think we always have control over everything that is scheduled. If we see something on our calendars and another event comes up we tend to go to the thing that was scheduled first. So if we pre-schedule our writing time then nothing should interfere with that. Third, push yourself to write by making other, more desirable things such as watching television contingent (for the day) on first completing the moderate goals of your bds. This kind of goes directly in with step two. Fourth, force yourself to write, under dire circumstances, by writing in order to avoid punishments. I think that the rest of the step is a bit extreme, mailing checks seems to be counterproductive because then you have an underlying stress about money. I would comment on the reactions section but I still remain surprised/ frustrated to see my exact reactions in the writing. However, realization #3 seems to be one that I would think I would fight against. I sometimes tell myself that my best work is done in the crunch time. However, this is most definitely not true we always try to think that we can still do a good job even at last minute, but the truth is we are not giving our ideas time to develop fully.
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