Deadlines, the procrastinator's friend
Depending on the circumstances a deadline can help you focus on a task. When you're writing, it forces you past the moments when you can't think where the story's going next and you want an excuse to go do something less taxing. But the deadline has to be real in some way.
Script Frenzy (don't sigh, I'm only mentioning it in passing as an example) was a real deadline for me because I'd told everyone I was doing it. If I gave up before the end, at the very least I'd have half a dozen people ask me what happened, and if the answer was 'inherent laziness kicked in', I might be a bit embarrassed. In other words, I'd have something to lose.
On the other hand, the deadline for a crime-writing competition last year wasn't real because, although I may have mentioned I was going to have a go at something in a vague sort of way, I'd never firmly promised anyone (even myself) that I would submit an entry. So giving up on it sometime last May wasn't a big deal, and I moved on to other things. However, a year later (to the day, I think, though that was coincidental) I thought about that part-written story which had been quite fun to start with, and seemed to have potential. I decided to resurrect it and see what happened. Five lunchtimes later I was a couple of paragraphs away from a first draft, and I finished it last night.
I'm not about to start announcing all my writing intentions in public, for one thing it would get tedious for all concerned. However, I do keep surprising myself by discovering what a focus can help me achieve, and if you're a procrastinating ditherer too it might be something you could try. Having decided I'd try and write every lunchtime at work, I'm finding my productivity goes up when I decide in advance what to work on and stick to it for the whole week or until it's finished. Not only does it cut out the agonising decision of what to write (or reduces its frequency) but it means I'm more determined to plough through the blocks.
Stephen King calls it writing with the door closed, if I remember correctly - writing the really rough draft that you wouldn't even want your cat to see. I'm often quite bad at that, spending too much time trying to get the phrase right the first time. Over the last week or so I've been deliberately writing the story as it comes, adding notes to myself to go back and check if I've used the right surname, for instance. What they call on all the courses I go on at work 'moving out of my comfort zone': increasing the word count and worrying about quality later. I know some people are sceptical about that - surely an hour of writing rubbish and an hour of redrafting can't come to much difference in wordcount than two hours of agonising first-time-pretty writing. Maybe I was on a roll this week, but when I went back over the draft last night I found that by quickly tweaking half a dozen sentences I had something that looked like it could have come out of my usual way of writing. It's still just a first draft, but it's a quicker first draft than I'd have got otherwise and the quality's about the same.
There's a lesson there, and I hope I learn it. If you're reading this because you don't want to work out what two of your characters say to each other next, go back and write. Better still, tell someone you're going to do it, then you'll have to.