In a column for the SF Site, Rick Klaw talks about strategies writers use to avoid, well, writing.

Jonathan Carroll, award-winning fantasist (and one of the most popular writers with the women inmates of the Gatesville, Texas maximum security prison), offers the Yiddish word pochkey for this creative quirk of aversion.

Pochkey means arranging your paper clips, sharpening pencils (often when they don’t need it), cleaning the keyboard of your computer down to the last speck of dust or fingernail clipping that might have fallen between the keys, etcetera. At the same time, writers may pochkey a lot but for better or worse, that doesn’t mean they aren’t working.

(link via Weirdwriter)

My own pochkey: I can’t write if there are dirty dishes in the sink. What’s odd is that their existence never really catches my interest at any other time, as Mr. Tingle would attest. But now our sink maintains a bristling whiteness throughout the day. Part of it is avoidance, and part of it feels like a need to have things In Order. (The sink is in my line of vision from the computer.) And when the writing is going well, when the words are running, it’s hard for me to believe that that will stop, and some complex brain reaction kicks in that equates writing well with being released from the chair. Ah, that’s how that scene will work, I think, and push back my chair and make some tea and come back … and it’s all gone dead.

I’m preparing my parents and husband for the fact that faithful as they’ve been, the novel may end up being dedicated to the dog. She’s five pounds and sleeps in my lap as I work. When I try to get up from the chair, she stirs and groans and generally carries on (all of her complaints are backed by horrendous breath, which smells like an egg-salad sandwich crawled into her mouth to die). It seems like she’s fulfilling the most basic, yet most essential, function of a muse: To keep the writer’s ass sitting down in the chair.

UPDATE: Josh Abraham alerts me that most likely the correct spelling for pochkey is, in fact, potchke (making it consistent with other Yiddish spellings, such as tchotchke.). He says the word was “a staple of my household, something for my dad to yell when I was sifting through crates of old comic books instead of doing homework or other chores: ‘Stop with the potchkeing around!’” (Incidentally, Tingle Alley’s own father’s complaints were more related to the tchotchke theme. I was a hoarder as a child, and used to create weird displays of bric-a-brac on all available shelving (pretty!), over which my dad would lament, “You’d keep a dead body if you found one.”)

Here is a recipe for Not-Too-Much-Potchke Fancy Cake.