A mil­lion, zil­lion years ago, I was mar­ried, and my spouse and I did not have an easy time keep­ing our space clean, and, if you lis­tened to them, the rea­son why was appar­ent­ly that we did­n’t own a set of card­board draw­ers.

Yes, you read that right. Stick with me, and I’ll make it make sense. And I’ll even tie it back to writ­ing.

First of all, I have to take a beat and rec­og­nize that there were a LOT of rea­sons we did­n’t keep our space clean. We were young. We did­n’t pri­or­i­tize nest­ing. We would rather play Final Fan­ta­sy 7 and try to beat Emer­ald Weapon. We both had exec­u­tive dys­func­tion around domes­tic chores, and while I don’t think it’s cool to do arm­chair diag­no­sis, if they told me tomor­row they also had ADHD, let’s just say I would­n’t drop my drink dra­mat­i­cal­ly to the floor where the cam­era would watch it shat­ter in slow motion. The place was also tiny and could go from pris­tine to post-apoc­a­lyp­tic movie set con­tender in only a sin­gle wadded-up ball of dirty clothes that did­n’t find the ham­per.

I was the hous­espouse (I usu­al­ly am in cohab­i­ta­tion arrange­ments), and so I would do 90% of the clean­ing, but I bris­tled at mess­es that were clut­ter sim­ply not put away or things aban­doned when they were done being used. I did­n’t mind the domes­tic chores, but just clean­ing up after some­one who is kind of sloven­ly has a total­ly dif­fer­ent vibe.

Every time I would bring this up, the answer was the same. “I need card­board draw­ers.” Now… if you’re think­ing… “wait a damn second—what do card­board draw­ers have to do with putting clothes in a ham­per or putting things away instead of just leav­ing them out?”, then I need you to imag­ine that I am hold­ing your hands firm­ly between mine, and if you are neu­rospicy I am look­ing at our hands, and if you aren’t, I am look­ing deep into your eyes until we are gaz­ing into each oth­er’s souls. That is when I say with a voice full of ardent emo­tion: “I AM RIGHT THERE WITH YOU. Right there. With you.”

Oth­er than sort of vague­ly both being about places to put things, there was no real con­nec­tive tis­sue. But the spouse swore with their hand to God that this was the ONE thing that was going to make all the dif­fer­ence.

“It’s the card­board draw­ers. It’ll give me a place to put things. It’ll all be bet­ter when we get them.”

“But that does­n’t—” I would sput­ter. “Those two things don’t even have any­thing to do with each oth­er. Only in the fact that one is LOOSELY relat­ed to the orga­ni­za­tion are they even remote­ly—”

“IT’LL ALL BE BETTER WHEN WE GET CARDBOARD DRAWERS!!!” they assured me.

I see a lot of writ­ers do this. They fix­ate on some­thing like their new desk or their ergonom­ic key­board, their new writ­ing pro­gram that orga­nizes their chap­ters for them, and while these things are nice, they don’t MAKE you write. Their absence does­n’t actu­al­ly pre­vent most peo­ple from writ­ing. And once you have them, doing the work might be eas­i­er, but it’s not going to do itself. You still have to sit down in your super ergonom­ic mega-com­fy chair and write for a few hours a day if you want to pump out a nov­el in a year.

Yes, you might be super mega com­fort­able doing it, but it’s still a lot of work, and it’s prob­a­bly not real­ly what’s hold­ing you back from just fir­ing off the great Amer­i­can nov­el.

The affec­ta­tion can be almost any­thing. It can be phys­i­cal, like a chair or a desk or a room that can be made into an office. I’ve heard peo­ple say they can’t write until they get an ergonom­ic key­board. Or it can be more cere­bral, like “next week when things get eas­i­er.” Or “once I take time off from work.” But the fact is that in almost every sit­u­a­tion where we’re sit­ting around and just wait­ing for some­thing to improve before we can start work in earnest, if we weren’t writ­ing before the thing, we won’t be writ­ing after the thing either.

The thing is just a thing we’ve told our­selves mat­ters.

Now, it’s not that none of these things mat­ter. Some of them may even help you write bet­ter or longer. I cer­tain­ly write more when I have a room and a desk to write at rather than with my back lean­ing against a wall with a lap­top pil­low while chil­dren play Enter the Drag­on two feet from me. If you’ve been here for more than, like, an hour, you know I am con­stant­ly com­plain­ing about a bet­ter sched­ule that is just a week away from kick­ing in.

But in the mean­time, I’m still writ­ing.

These things, like chairs and offices and sched­ules, are not REALLY writ­ing, and it is the peo­ple who sit down even when they don’t have a per­fect sched­ule, a per­fect chair, or a per­fect writ­ing pro­gram and DO THE WORK who end up doing bet­ter when they have one or more of those things. I talk about these things and work on improv­ing them, but in the mean­time, I write.

And when I did­n’t, it was­n’t because of chairs and offices and sched­ules. It was because I was get­ting over can­cer and a mis­car­riage and four kinds of sup­port­ing-my-part­ner-through-trau­ma, and I just did­n’t real­ly WANT to. And when I want­ed to, I went right back to wish­ing the desk sit­u­a­tion and the sched­ule were bet­ter, but get­ting the writ­ing done any­way.

Unswervingly—and I mean maybe there are some excep­tions in the his­to­ry of the world, but we’re talk­ing real­ly close to 100%—everyone who sits around and waits for some fac­tor to be improved before they can even start ends up find­ing a new rea­son they can’t do the work once they get what they were wait­ing for. The office needs a new desk. The ergonom­ic key­board works, but now a desk that can go up and down is need­ed so that writ­ing can be done stand­ing up. The week off had to be used doing all the home improve­ment that had been pro­cras­ti­nat­ed, so we need ANOTHER week off.

There’s always one more thing.

In an M. Night Shya­malan­ian mid-career plot twist (that is to say, entire­ly pre­dictable by any­one with a pulse), get­ting card­board draw­ers did not solve the prob­lem of our messy house. A few things were put away. We had a slight­ly bet­ter sys­tem of orga­ni­za­tion. It was eas­i­er to clean up when we cleaned up. BUT… the piles of dirty clothes did not move them­selves to the laun­dry, and the mess­es I cleaned up after were still there. Because the prob­lem was nev­er the absence of card­board draw­ers. Fix­at­ing on them, and fix­at­ing on the prob­lem as some­how insur­mount­able with­out them, just meant we kicked the can down the road for deal­ing with the actu­al problem—the fuck­ing clothes need­ed to be put in the fuck­ing ham­per.

The same thing hap­pens with writ­ing. The longer there is one more thing with­out which writ­ing is “sim­ply impos­si­ble,” then the real issue—that it’s time to apply ass to chair and do some writ­ing and all the ergonom­ic fur­ni­ture in the world won’t make your work write itself—is not being addressed.

So get your super desk or your card­board draw­ers or your Vor­lon-inspired writ­ing pro­gram that keeps track of your char­ac­ter arcs, keeps track of your adverbs, keeps track of pas­sive voice, and keeps track of your time­line for you, but don’t EVER for­get that you still have to actu­al­ly DO the writ­ing.

And you at least start THAT… with­out the card­board draw­ers.