Excuses, excuses

"I can't come to class today because I'm auditioning for American Idol."

"I can't come to class today because my friends are in town for only one day and I promised I'd take them to a Cubs game."

"I can't come to class today because I am participating in a medical research study. They're going to inject some kind of new medicine in me and pay me $50. "

"I can't come to class on time because my roommate refuses to wake me up for it."

These are just a few of the excuses that students give me for not showing up to class. The most common excuses are the "family emergency" and "I am sick" ones, because they think that I won't question them since then it gets into the gray area of being too "personal." But after about eight students in the past two weeks told me they were sick and couldn't come to class, I got irritated and suspicious. I would never accuse them of lying, of course. And more often than not, students really are too sick to come to class, because I've had more than one student show me a doctor's note or even a note from the emergency room. But on the other hand, people started missing class, coming in late, or leaving early a lot more often at around the same time the baseball season started and the weather started warming up.

What bothers me most is when students don't show up to class on multiple occasions (some will disappear for weeks or months) and still expect to get full credit for the class; i.e., they still expect to earn B's or even A's. After having spent the past several years teaching, I can honestly say that if I had a dollar for every excuse I've heard from a student, I'd be able to pay for at least two months' worth of junk food - er, I mean, groceries.

But today I started thinking about all the excuses I make for not writing.

"I can't write tonight because I'm too tired from working and studying all day."

"I can't write because I have a stack of papers to grade."

"I can't write because the weather outside is perfect, which only happens about five times a year in Chicago."

"I can't write until after I watch Frasier." (I love Frasier Crane. Yes, the show ended years ago. But I love watching reruns. Frasier is my television alter ego - at least, he would be if I were a middle-aged white guy - because he is so wonderfully neurotic and obsessive.)

I've wanted to be a writer for years, yet I always make excuses for not finishing stories or not working on the manuscript I started more than a year ago. Thinking about all the excuses from students who don't show up but still expect full credit made me realize that I can't keep making excuses. If I don't show up to write more often, I can't expect to finish my manuscript, let alone get published someday.

Starting this blog has been a great way for me to start writing more regularly, but I think it's only the first step. I have to discipline myself to work on my manuscript for more than just a few hours a week, even though I currently work two jobs and am in graduate school, which is a full-time job in itself. I'm not even sure if my first novel is publishable, but I think that just to have completed one would be awesome. And then I could finally start working on the new stories I've been thinking about. (I've tried writing more than one story at a time, but I get too confused and start putting characters for one story into the other one. It's like a literary parallel universe.)

What kind of excuses do you make for not writing, and how do you get past them? I'm always interested in learning.