Driven to distraction
by Features Editor Shelah Miner
I spent yesterday afternoon at home with a sick kid instead of at church. She was just barely sick enough that we didn’t want to inflict her on the other kids at nursery, so I stayed home with plans to plop her in front of the television and write this blog post.
My husband pulled out of the garage with the older kids and I turned on Dora, sat down at the computer, and wracked my brain for something to write about.
Instead of writing, I spent the next four hours up in the attic, sorting through boxes, consolidating, labeling, and schlepping everything down to the garage. We’re moving in about two weeks, so right now getting my house in order consumes my thoughts.
A few hours later, I tried again. I sat down again, this time with kids running around and a basketball game blaring in the background, and the words that wouldn’t come earlier flowed easily.
It should have been easier when the house was quiet, there were no distractions, and I had plenty of time. Why didn’t it work out that way?
Similarly, last week I was working on an article for Segullah. Although I was able to start the piece without too much angst, pretty soon I wasn’t getting anywhere. Instead, I found myself staring at the computer, deadline looming closer by the second, hoping something new to read would pop up in Google Reader, that someone would comment on something I’d written at fMh (I think half of my blog posts come to me when I’m avoiding something else I should be doing), or some kind of fight would break out on the message boards I frequent. I was on the prowl for anything (anything!) that would keep me planted in my chair, ostensibly working, while my unconscious mind figured out how to unstick my conscious mind. It took three excruciating days to plunk out a 750-word article. Every night, I tried to relax and watch tv, but all I could think was that I should be writing. On the upside, I added three couches, a dining room table, and a bunch of chairs to the new house dream list while I was surfing the internet and waiting for inspiration to strike.
How do writer’s block, distractions and procrastination present for you? How do you cope? And does writing with constant internet access help you or just provide too much temptation when you’re trying to write?
Subscribe to RSS
May 19th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
I envy your ability to work in chaos. I need quiet, which I suppose is why I didn’t write much when the munchkins were really munchkins. Nothing aggravates me more than trying to hear my text with Bart Simpson laughing behind me, or when I get the constant, “Mom this” and “Mom that.”
But yeah, deadlines are evil, idea killers. Don’t know why that is, but it is.
May 20th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Lisa, you let your kids watch the Simpsons?! For shame!
As for me and my writing, I only need one thing to get going. I discovered it when I was a news writer. To get an article going, all I needed to do was think of the first line. Because, of course, in news writing, you encapsulate the story in the first line. A ready first line meant that I had processed the information enough to write the article, and that I had a workable frame for it.
Later, in grad school, I used the same process. All I had to do was figure out a very rough narrative for the paper: a beginning, middle, and end, each of which logically followed its predecessor. It took a bit of doing at first, but, after getting three graduate degrees, I can now come up with these narratives quite easily. As long as I can cast ideas into a logical narrative progression, everything just flows.
Of course, then I have to revise so it doesn’t suck.