WHENEVER I’M ANXIETY RIDDEN and just can’t seem to start or finish an important project, I try to practice what I call “productive procrastination.” It happens when I know that binging on countless hours of Netflix or reality television will shackle me with so much guilt, I have to force myself to do clean the toilet or pay bills. But when the appliances are so clean they sparkle and the neighbors can smell the pungent, lemon scented Pine-Sol, my story in progress is still waiting at my desk and I have nothing left to do except actually start writing.

Cue writing-related articles. If I’m not actually writing, at least I can read about writing.

While the Internet is flooded with top ten lists and byte-sized writing advice, Flavorwire recently posted a list of “10 of the Greatest Essays On Writing Ever Written,” which I’m sure will satisfy my productive procrastination needs for the rest of the week. You can check out the list here at Flavorwire.

Some of the essays include classics such as Robert Frost’s “The Figure a Poem Makes,” T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and George Orwell’s “Why I Write.” The list also offers writing advice by other more contemporary, genre-bending writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Lethem, and Kate Bernheimer that are definitely worth putting on your reading list. When I’m wrestling with a story or essay, it’s refreshing to take a break and settle down with well-thought out explorations of writing related issues such as fairy tale form, keeping a writer’s notebook, and the psychological obstacles faced by creative-types. Usually, I’m able to use what I’ve just read to solve a problem I’m currently facing so I don’t feel nearly as guilty as I would baking three dozen cookies I probably shouldn’t eat.

Other books about writing I’d recommend are The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House and The Writer’s Notebook II, Graywolf Press’s incredibly comprehensive The Art Of series, and David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. If you haven’t already dug into the archives of the Paris Review’s Interviews, they’re the most important collection of serious interviews with serious authors available on the Internet. Brevity Magazine also hosts an online archive of brief yet complex craft essays about nonfiction that really pack a punch.

Happy procrastinating!
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ABOUT JANE HAWLEY: A member of the Random Writers Workshop, she also studies fiction at Texas State University’s MFA Program, splitting her time between Bakersfield, California and San Marcos, Texas. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Texas State’s Front Porch Journal. Her nonfiction and photographs have been published in Memoir Journal, Scribendi, Orange Quarterly, and Utter. You can find her on Twitter @janenhawley.