Writing in an Age of Distraction

[Cain]

http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html

The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn't help my writing. This advice was wrong creatively, professionally, artistically, and personally, but I know where the writer who doled it out was coming from. Every now and again, when I see a new website, game, or service, I sense the tug of an attention black hole: a time-sink that is just waiting to fill my every discretionary moment with distraction. As a co-parenting new father who writes at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches, I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is.

But the Internet has been very good to me. It's informed my creativity and aesthetics, it's benefited me professionally and personally, and for every moment it steals, it gives back a hundred delights. I'd no sooner give it up than I'd give up fiction or any other pleasurable vice.

I think I've managed to balance things out through a few simple techniques that I've been refining for years. I still sometimes feel frazzled and info-whelmed, but that's rare. Most of the time, I'm on top of my workload and my muse. Here's how I do it:

* Short, regular work schedule

When I'm working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I'm working on it. It's not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it's entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there's always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn't become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day's page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you've already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.
   
* Leave yourself a rough edge

When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you're in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you're in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day's knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the "hint." Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it's hard to build on a smooth edge.
   
* Don't research

Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.
   
* Don't be ceremonious

Forget advice about finding the right atmosphere to coax your muse into the room. Forget candles, music, silence, a good chair, a cigarette, or putting the kids to sleep. It's nice to have all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem of finding the right environment at the same time. When the time is available, just put fingers to keyboard and write. You can put up with noise/silence/kids/discomfort/hunger for 20 minutes.
   
* Kill your word-processor

Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, "correcting" your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don't write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they're at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can't transmit a virus.
   
* Realtime communications tools are deadly

The biggest impediment to concentration is your computer's ecosystem of interruption technologies: IM, email alerts, RSS alerts, Skype rings, etc. Anything that requires you to wait for a response, even subconsciously, occupies your attention. Anything that leaps up on your screen to announce something new, occupies your attention. The more you can train your friends and family to use email, message boards, and similar technologies that allow you to save up your conversation for planned sessions instead of demanding your attention right now helps you carve out your 20 minutes. By all means, schedule a chat — voice, text, or video — when it's needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant "DISTRACT ME" sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world.

I don't claim to have invented these techniques, but they're the ones that have made the 21st century a good one for me.

[LMNO]

I totally could have used this in November.


Ah, who am I kidding?  The only way I could have finished that is if I wasn't married.

[AFK]

I totally could have used this in November.


Ah, who am I kidding?  The only way I could have finished that is if I wasn't married.

And then add a 4 year old child to that equation. 

[indigoblade]

Thanx so much cain. This is the type (punny huh?) of pointers I have been looking for since I have been wanting to get back into writing. I haven't really wrote since my early twenties and I have been looking to get back into it. If you know any sites that are really good for brushing up on grammer that would be helpful as well.

[Cain]

Thanx so much cain. This is the type (punny huh?) of pointers I have been looking for since I have been wanting to get back into writing. I haven't really wrote since my early twenties and I have been looking to get back into it. If you know any sites that are really good for brushing up on grammer that would be helpful as well.

This might help. 

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/

Also check the sticky by me up the top of this forum, which should contain links to books on improving your writing.

[indigoblade]

Thanx so much cain. This is the type (punny huh?) of pointers I have been looking for since I have been wanting to get back into writing. I haven't really wrote since my early twenties and I have been looking to get back into it. If you know any sites that are really good for brushing up on grammer that would be helpful as well.

This might help. 

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/

Also check the sticky by me up the top of this forum, which should contain links to books on improving your writing.

You're a cool dude no matter what they say. Though what they say and who they are I couldn't know, but still. Extra thanx fer teh help.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

RAH!

Also, I agree completely with the anti-word processor position. The essay that convinced me:

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

[Triple Zero]

don't want to turn this thread into an editor application war, but for all you windows users out there, do yourself a favour and install www.pspad.com , IMO the best text editor out there, and it's free. (oldskool people may remember UltraEdit, which is commercial software, PSPad has nearly all features UE has, and some additional useful ones).
It's great for editing code or websites because you can open and save files directly to FTP. For text writing, good features are that you can customize the fonts and colours to be easier on the eye (i prefer RGB(255,255,192) bright yellow background to white, with the current line highlighted in white). Notepad doesn't do this. Other things are of course line, word and character count, Uppercase/Lowercase/Title Case conversion, advanced search/replace options (over multiple files at once) and much more you can find through the menus. (for the code-monkeys, I hardly need to mention that it comes pre-installed with a good amount of syntax-highlighting definitions, and even more to download from the website).

[Kai]

Darkroom or Darkwriter for the win.

[Iason Ouabache]

I've never really had a problem with the word processor issue.  I don't play around with all the extra tools in the first place.  I'll have to try the "Don't Research" tip though.  I'm really really really really bad about that one.

[CynicalCichilid]

Thanks for the tips Cain, the 'rough edge' one seems like it could help a lot.