Tips for Dealing with Distractions

When you're writing a first draft, a very important thing to do is tell the red pen inside your head to shut up. You do not need to be fixing typos at this point. That will slow you down, distract you. Did Frodo stop to sweep cobwebs out of Shelob’s lair on the way into Mordor? No. He knew his goal: get to Mount Doom.

Of course, there were also plenty of distractions that got poor Frodo distracted against his will. That’s the way life works sometimes. We can be as single-minded and determined as we like, but distractions will come up. Here are a few bits advice about how to deal with them.

• Good life rule: people are important. Especially people close to you, like your friends and family. Remember that guy in high school who ditched all his friends because he started dating his first girlfriend? Don’t be that guy with your novel. Be realistic in what you can accomplish without becoming an anti-social jerk.

• When people find out you’re writing a novel, they are going to ask you, “So, what’s it about?” I never have an answer for this one. Summaries, for me, come after I’m done. If you want to avoid answering this one 700 times, only tell a few people what you’re doing. That takes some of the pressure off anyway.

• Don’t beat yourself up if circumstances come up that make you put your writing on hold for a little while. A new baby, a move, a funeral, a summer full of activities and weddings and graduations…those things happen. If you can write a little bit even in busy times, that’s great. If not, just promise yourself you’ll go back to writing later…and actually follow through.

• It’s probably not a good idea to let someone read your novel before it’s done. The exception might be if you just want a yes or no answer to something like, “Is this interesting?” But, often, people want to give advice on how to improve. That’s a super important part of the editing process…but you’re not there yet.

• Writer’s block: This one cannot be shoved aside in just a sentence or two, because there are so many reason that writing might grind to a sudden halt. Lucky for you, I've already written a post about it. And another one. And I'll probably write several more in the future.

•  For many people, it helps to set aside a consistent time to write. Schedule it into your life. Maybe that’s unrealistic for you. But give it a try. And turn off your phone, for goodness sake. And social media. Checking Facebook every five minutes doesn't help with your word count.

•  Reward little victories. Celebrate every chapter, even if you don’t know how you could possibly write another one. With each sentence you type, you are getting closer to a goal that most people abandon somewhere before page five. 
   

Writing is hard work, and can be frustrating, time-consuming, and exhausting.

Maybe it shouldn’t be that way. Maybe writing should be…well…fun. When you loved to do something as a kid, you didn’t have to force yourself to do it. Writing can be like that. It won’t always be. But if you can get back to the place where it feels like snapping one Lego brick on top of another, slowly creating a more complex masterpiece, then do it.

Tune out the internal voices that say you’ll never be good enough for this. Don’t worry about what other people will think. It’s not the time for that, not yet, and maybe not ever.

Just write because you love it. Try things. Take a break from your novel and write something just for the fun of it. Re-read something that turned out just the way you wanted it to. Remember that you’re telling a story, and remind yourself why you want to tell it.

Making Vows to Me

Sunday School teachers love the book of Judges.

You know why? Because the judges of Israel are pretty much like The Avengers, except with God.

Samson is a cross between the smash-everything-anger-problems Hulk and the billionaire playboy philanthropist Tony Stark (maybe not the genius part, though). Gideon starts out as the mild-mannered Steve Rogers who goes from a nobody to a victorious commander of the troops. Deborah and Jael go all Black Widow on the guys (the tent peg to the temple has got to be one of the best moves in history). Ehud sneaks in and stabs a really fat king, and has plenty of time to escape because everyone else thinks the king must be taking a long time to go to the bathroom.

I’m not sure which Avenger that corresponds to. But it’s a great story anyway.

But there’s one judge who no one really likes, who no one talks about or relates to or includes in elementary school coloring books.

Jephthah.

Time is Money

Have you ever read the fine print at the bottom of receipts? Along with a store phone number or a survey you should fill out online, there’s an enthusiastic note for you, their valued customer, something like “Total Money Saved: $78.23!” This adds up all of the sales on the items that you bought for less than the normal price (which, in my family would be pretty much every item except for those that are so generic that their prices cannot be brought down because it’s not worth the cost of printing a coupon).

At Christmas, the women of my family will go shopping. When we return with bulging bags and obnoxious holiday songs stuck in our heads, Grandpa will look at the receipts and say, with a good-natured sneer, “‘You Saved $35.38,’ it says. Well, show me the money!”

He has a good point. You didn’t save $35.38 on the three sweaters, pair of shoes, silver earrings, and pair of fuzzy socks that were an impulse buy at the register. You spent $84.99, plus tax. Sure, if you would have spent that money anyway, it’s good that you got some of the items at a lower price than usual. Sometimes, though, the promise of saving money leads us to spend more than we need.

I realized recently that it’s the same with time. One of my extracurricular activities ended last week. If you would print out the receipt of my life, it would now read, “Total Time Saved: 3 Hours!”

Except I didn’t save that time, at least not last week. I spent it in tiny increments on things that I wouldn’t have done otherwise. Daydreaming during homework, forcing me to read the same article twice. Taking a nap that was twice as long as what I needed. Wandering around on Facebook, looking for something meaningful in the slush pile of pictures of people I don’t know that well, mindless memes that might occasionally be mildly funny, and the many trials and triumphs of Farmville.

Legalism and Spell Check

I want to make sure that no one got the wrong impression from what I said about excellence in Wednesday’s post. Sometimes, I tend to take my perspective and preach it to the world, without taking time to consider the other side.

And I know there is another side to this because when I was a sophomore in high school, I decided that what I needed to do in order to be a better writer was turn off spell check.

Yep. That was my secret to success. I was going to get rid of those squiggly lines forever. Not because I held some hippie-like belief that I should just try spelling words however I felt like to free myself from an oppressive and arbitrary system of spelling. I just thought that being forced to look up words I didn’t know how to spell in an actual dictionary would be a good discipline to get into and (somehow, not sure how this was going to work) make me a more careful editor.

When I gave up on this little program after only three weeks, I chalked it up to laziness and felt a little ashamed of my “failure.”

Later, I learned this important rule: making something harder is not the same as making something better.

Learning the Hard Way

Sometimes, lessons you learn are obvious, timeless, and can be woven seamlessly into a brilliant allegorical narrative.

Other times, you just have to go over there by Qwerty and talk about what you learned today. Some lessons might not be very clear from just the story itself, so you have to spell it out. Which is what I'll be doing on Qwerty, the name I just gave the computer I'm working on.

Qwerty is not my computer. And this is not the blog post I intended to write.

The real blog post for today is sitting quietly on my hard drive, safe and sound . . . and out of reach. It was written several days ago and has been proofread twice, all set and ready to post.

Until a seven-year-old threw an exercise ball at my computer and cracked the display.

Just a typical day in my life with my host family here in Colorado. The poor kid ran away and hid from me the rest of the night. Which is a real shame, because he missed admiring the splintered cyan-yellow-and-magenta glory that is my computer screen.

You would think that there wouldn't be a lot to learn from this (except for the obvious "don't-make-kids-mad-by-doing-homework-on-your-computer-instead-of-playing-with-them"). But this one has more moral-of-the-story potential than a contrived sermon illustration or one of Aesop's fables.

Creativity Margin

Busyness is a virtue.

You know why? Because, when I look back on my life, I don’t want to see wasted time.

I want to set goals, get involved, use my gifts, change the world, even. I never want to be bored, because that means I’m lazy. I’m not even sure how often I want to be silent and still, because what does that accomplish?

I stay busy because there’s so much to do. And if I don’t do it, who will?

Or maybe . . .

No.

That couldn’t be it.

But maybe it is for some people. Not me . . . right?

Except sometimes I wonder if maybe I stay busy because I’m afraid that when I look back on my life, I won’t have accomplished anything.