HOWTO write in the age of distraction
We know that our readers are distracted and sometimes even overwhelmed by the myriad distractions that lie one click away on the Internet, but of course writers face the same glorious problem: the delirious world of information and communication and community that lurks behind your screen, one alt-tab away from your word-processor.Writing in the Age of DistractionThe 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
the latest
latest episodes
could someone sum this up for me?
i got bored somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph. ;]
What about rewriting and editing? 20 minute sessions for those too?
Superlative suggestions, thank you tremendously Cory.
Those tips are great for any type of work from home, I always struggle with the mountains of distraction and simple things like switching Messenger off are going to be a huge help. The 'no research' idea is also top-drawer, I can get lost for hours in pursuits which, although work-related, really aren't getting my job done.
Cheers!
Fiction = a pleasurable vice?
All great suggestions, except for the word-processing one, unless you're writing in English. Unfortunately, most text editors are still uncapable of (properly) handling those exotic non-english letters that some of us need...
Milena, I generally just use HTML entities for high-ASCII/UTF-8 characters -- e.g., ampersand-eacute-semicolon for é. Afterwards, you can just open the doc in Firefox (which will render all the entities), copy it to the clipboard, and paste into OpenOffice or whatever.
Funny how most people manage an eight hours of work most days without much distraction at all though.
-20 points for using the ridiculous term "co-parenting."
Thanks for that. It was quite enlightening.
The point about ceremony is a good one. Too often having the idea of there being a right ambience or mood to be creative can be an excuse to procrastinate.
Milena: This is strange. Judging by your name, you use Latin2 (as I do) or perhaps Cyrillic. All editors and text processors I use work with Latin2 correctly.
Cory: Excellent suggestion!
I understand the idea of leaving a "rough edge" but it drives me insane when I know I came up with a better way to end the sentence/paragraph/scene earlier. I sometimes fall asleep thinking about what I will write the next morning only to wake up and kick myself for not remembering the exact phrasing.
Word is my friend. I don't care too much about formatting (at least not in prose fiction) but I am a notoriously bad speller and couldn't live without the red line letting me know I did it wrong. Before I got in browser spellchecking I used to compose or at least cut and paste long posts in Word.
The whole 20 minute thing is good though. That's basically what I do for fiction. I get up in the morning, grab coffee and breakfast, turn on Morning Edition, and spend the next hour writing. I find that I focus better with something I can half pay attention to.
i'm a writer who works near 5 other writers, and the things i do to maintain focus are:
play music with no lyrics into my headphones just loud enough to where I can't understand conversations going on around me.
move out of my chair and walk through the building with a notepad in my hand, scribbling ideas, then returning to my seat when the scribbling stops.
keep an interesting story in a browser tab that I can click over to at any moment, but avoid any sort of chat program.
...
it just took me 15 minutes to write all this.
I second Kyle's -20 for using the term "co-parenting".
-abs thinks that "parenting" is a fine term to use when talking about what you do to/with your kids. "co-parenting" makes it sound like you're part of a massive co-op of parents who provide parenting services for each other's kids, which is a really cool idea, but -abs just doesn't buy that you meant it that way
I like this, Cory--thanks! My version of the "rough edge" came from some Ernest Hemingway, I think, who said to stop writing in the middle of a thought. (As a knitter and someone who's thrown a few pots, I'm not sure I get the crafting references, but I totally get the writing one!)
I often have to work in more than 20 minute blocks--or perhaps, in many many 20 minute blocks--and my only distractions are the ones I make for myself (no kids, no dog, etc.). I find leechblock works well when I'm in crunchtime and need to cut down on--ahem--reading blogs and such.
Also I go to a coffee shop where I'd have to pay for internet access (but don't), put loud music on through earbuds, and camp out for a few hours.
The coffee shop thing works for me; I focus a lot more when I'm in one, for some reason.
Thank you for this was excellent advice. I really struggle with writing, since I have a 9-to-5 job, and can only write at lunchtime, evenings (when I am tired), and during busy weekends.
Losing ceremoniousness is exactly the opposite of what I've been taught in excellent writing workshops, but when push comes to shove, the writing has to take precedent over ceremony.
"..our readers are distracted and sometimes even overwhelmed by the myriad distractions"
...I got distracted by the distractions of that lead sentence.
In other words, just like my mom used to say, "Shut off that TV and get your homework done, I don't care if the Pirates have the bases loaded!"
or as I tell my students,
"Now stop yackin' and start crackin'!"
The point about ceremony is a good one. Too often having the idea of there being a right ambience or mood to be creative can be an excuse to procrastinate.
I don't need an excuse to procrastinate.
-20 points for using the ridiculous term "co-parenting."
Agreed, unless Cory lives in a commune.
The internet is terrific because it often involves regular people, not heavily edited and filtered talking heads. Also, it grants access to current events in rapid-fire style.
So, first thing in the morning, I draw in enough news to get very angry at the idiocy in the world. Then I pack up and ride my bike to a coffee shop, or to drive to the woods and use a composition book, along the way I think about scenes, write them on location or in the woods as I hike.
This is small potatoes, however, to knowing what to write, what to excise in a rough draft, what leads to create, specifically. I call it "finding the path of least resistance" the way electricity does.
IamInnocent @ #8: Funny how most people manage an eight hours of work most days without much distraction at all though.
*looks around her workplace*
Say what? Maybe you work with a more diligent bunch of people than I do, but out of the ~1,000 employees here, I'd say that exactly zero of them manage "eight hours of work without much distraction at all".
As for "co-parenting", if I'm not mistaken, everyone who's criticized the term so far is male. (If I'm wrong, my apologies.) If that's the case, it's not surprising if you fail to see why the term is necessary — it's because the traditional division of "parenting" duties usually ends up with the mother doing most of the "parenting".
And it's not just mothers who have a problem with it. I've heard more than a few fathers ranting about being asked "so, are you helping with the kids today?" as if they're merely glorified babysitters. Single fathers get particularly irritated by this, it seems. Understandably.
I'm going to go ahead and also comment on the ridiculousness of "co-parenting". And yes, I'm also male. However, as far as I'm concerned, "co-parenting" belongs to the communal realm as well.
My dad was a stay-at-home dad, did nearly all the cooking and cleaning, while my mother worked for IBM as a project manager. What my dad did was "parent".
Ever more importantly, for most of my life my teachers have done nearly as much "parenting" as my "parents"; that's where I spent a very large portion of the time that I wasn't sleeping. Plus, I think we all know Cory's a guy, so if you're using "co-parenting" to emphasize his maleness, why, I guess he should thank you :p
A great essay; however, programmers' editors are absolutely nothing like word processors, for the same reason that chainsaws are absolutely nothing like straight razors. I wouldn't want to write text in Brief, or code in Word, just because both cases would be gross acts of tool misuse.
You don't use a screwdriver as a crowbar (unless, of course, you desperately need a crowbar and don't have one handy.)
Wait, is this by the same Cory Doctorow who posted about signing up to WoW yesterday?
This is excellent. Very good points. I know a poet I am going to send this to.
I don't get the animosity towards word processors. It is true that they have more tools than you need, but one of those tools is the ability to make the other tools disappear. In OpenOffice for example, there's a button that toggles the auto-spellcheck, and if the interface bugs you, Ctrl+Shift+J will kick it into the toolbar-free full-screen mode.
another decent writing technique:
if you know you are threshing out an idea but you also know that you just laid out the wrong adjective, or any word for that matter, just put in in brackets and move on. it takes forever trying to find the precise fit, and your train of thought gets completely derailed in the process. YOU know what you mean, so leave it up to later to find the clarifications so that others might, too. wasting mental fuel doesn't help you accomplish any goals, and the brain naturally moves on quite quickly.
exception: you're trying to figure out what the hell you just said in that last sentence ;)
it's hard to tear up work that was published to the entire world the moment you posted it. This can be a good thing.
I discovered this article because someone posted a link on Twitter. How's that for irony?
I've tried stopping in mid-sentence, but invariably I come back the next day and have no idea what I meant to write next. "The hero drew his sword, and with one mighty blow, he-- " He what? Put it back? Dropped it and gave himself an owie? Cut a slice of salami? What?
More concerning irony: for a few seconds I couldn't concentrate on reading the first sentence of the article because of the flashing green Congratulations This Is Not A Joke You Won ad on the left.
BTW good stuff, Cory.
I'm with MEHILOW - there was some ad "click here - you have won..." that beeped every four seconds on the Locus site - What The Hey?
I think this is very good advice, especially the point about doing a modest amount *every day*.
One thing, though: There's more to writing than the actual writing; many fiction writers don't start the actual writing process before they reach a point where the novel's plot, characters, episodes, dialoues etc. more or less already exist in the author's head.
After all, you can't just decide to write a novel and start writing two pages a day from day one. So how to get room for the thinking needed before you start putting the proverbial pen of the paper? And at which stage of the work's completion would you usually start the actual writing process?
I suppose Cory doesn't have the time to monitor this thread, so I'd be happy for any suggestions.
@Lexica
Good for you. Now enlarge you horizons a bit.
Kyle, Abs, et al, I think Cory is using co-parenting to mean "equally responsible for primary childcare". Lots of self-employed and work-from-home parents do things this way, or at least try to.
Don't write a novel in EMACS.
Sorry, I meant to add to that. The reasons you shouldn't use EMACS to write a novel:
It has no good word wrapping mode, you can spend all your time manually wrapping paragraphs, or use longlines mode, which will butcher your autosaves. Do you want to go through an entire file replacing every newline? It's possible if you use longlines mode and shutdown the computer without remembering to make a manual save in EMACS.
Longlines also implements the fiasco of relative indents. What this means is every indent is relative to words in the last line. Maybe one of my programming modifications is meddling with this, I don't know, all I know is that if I copy my .txt file anywhere, I have to go through and manually correct every single indent manually.
Maybe actual writers like Cory can send people text files formatted however they want, but as far as I'm aware, when I submit my work to an agent or publisher, they expect it to be in a standard format, with standard paragraph indents, and scene breaks denoted by a # in the center of the page. Maybe I'm being anal trying to adhere to these standards, and if my writing was any good it wouldn't matter. I don't know.
It really breaks my goddamn heart, because I love EMACS, I know all the shortcuts and everything. But whenever I've tried it, it's sucked for writing human legible text.
RIAZM, when I was at the university, I wrote my entire thesis in EMACS (LaTeX, though), as well as a large number of programs, while editing a huge number of HTML and .txt files.
I never had any of the problems you describe (I don't actually even know what "longlines" is). Maybe there's some word wrapping option in more recent EMACS editions you didn't set?
Anyway, I switched to vi/vim long ago, and vim does have decent word wrapping. :-) Still, when Cory refers to the tips as a "grab-bag", I suppose they are to be used "if they work for you". You could also use OpenOffice (say), using only basic text editing and not wasting your time on any of the fancy features which take time away from *writing*.
Wordpad or gedit should work just as fine :-).
I seriously do use EMACS for all my coding, and .conf file editing and everything. That's the reason I spend so much time trying to use it for writing everything else. It kills me trying to use OpenOffice because I'm always having to go to the ARROW KEYS to move up or down a line. It drives me totally crazy.
It's not that I want to use EMACS because it's simple, I want to use it because it's so brutally efficient at manipulating text. But the sad fact is, I'll have to copy it into OpenOffice eventually, and once I do, I'm going to have to deal with a bunch of formatting problems. It's so depressing. I hate formatting.
BTW Longlines mode is a mode that's activated whenever Emacs is in text mode, it handles word wrapping without breaking words across lines. Maybe I should just learn to deal with words being broken across lines, but it really bothers me. You can turn it on using m-x longlines-mode to see how it works.
Maybe I'll make the switch to the dark side... Vim
Vim
Noooooooooo!
I've long suspected Cory Doctorow to be a prodigy. The man is awash in a torrent of words. I suspect they are his natural element: reading, writing, talking (probably even in his sleep). I recently told a friend, "Doctorow is the Maxwell Grant* of the interwebs." A book a year, interrupted only by personal and business correspondence, would be quite an achievement; his annual output, therefore, is nothing short of extraordinary.
His nuts and bolts suggestions are good, especially about word processors, but his ''in the cockpit'' (Ken Kesey) advice is idiosyncratic and personal; find your own rhythm and place. Some writers are best at dawn, some at midnight. My favorite bit of advice was "It's okay to write when you're drunk, but be sober when you edit; you can't bullshit a hangover." (Raymond Chandler) I would no more try to write in a coffee shop than I would try to play my trombone in a closet.
The best poem I ever wrote was during a 15-minute wait in a dentist's waiting room. It validates the Chidiock Tichborne claim of the execution-eve composition of his great poem, "Elegy".) When I wrote as a reporter, although I hate to dignify such brick-stacking as writing, I loved deadlines; they gave me the excuse of being under pressure in case I fucked up.
There is, however, one piece of universal advice that no one disputes: It won't get written unless you do it NOW.
* The pen name of magician Walter B. Gibson who wrote 282 The Shadow novels, and as many other equally crappy pulps; he had this to say:
Sometimes it comes easy,
sometimes it comes hard;
but nothing will push you
like a penny a word.
I've been trying out Cory's advice during fiction-writing time, it's been terrific.
I have an alcoholic's attitude toward social media -- OTHER PEOPLE have a problem, but not me, I can handle it.
However, I'm surprised by how easy and more pleasurable it is to concentrate on fiction if I just shut down my Twitter client, social media, Web browser, e-mail notification, and instant message clients, and just write.
I need to think about how to apply this in other areas of my work and life.
BUDDY66, I'm pretty sure that Raymond Chandler was an alcoholic. I'm not trying to contradict your larger points, which are fine (even though I'm not sure I agree with them), I'm just saying that an alcoholic's statements about the lack of harmfulness of alcohol are not to be trusted.
Sorry to do two consecutive posts here, but I thought of the second thing after I hit the POST button on the first.
I don't think Chandler was encouraging writers to drink; he was warning them, so to speak, not to hit the ''send'' button before looking with a sober eye at what they wrote while partaking of the joy juice.
Oh, he was an alcoholic, all right. His working life was the common answer to the question asked his generation, What do writers do when they're not writing?
Why, they drink, of course.
BUDDY66 - Ah. Different points, and good ones.
I think Chandler was part of about two centuries of tradition of thinking about art that has proven harmful to society and especially to artists -- the idea that creating art is some magical process practiced by some magical beings who are magic and stand aside from the rest of mere mortals.
What do artists do when they're not creating art? Well, if you're Raymond Chandler, you drink, and if you're Ernest Hemingway you drink and engage in a perpetual losing struggle to prove your masculinity to yourself.
But you might also choose to just be part of the human race. In that case, what do you do when you're not writing? You eat, and sleep, and make love, and deal with finances, and go to your kids' PTA meetings and soccer practice, just like a normal person. Which is what you are.
Writing is work, like accounting or cleaning out the garage.
As to finding your own special rhythm and place -- well, we all have to do that to some extent, but it's best to minimize that where possible and maximize flexibility. If you can only write between 6-8 am while drinking coffee from your special blue mug, what happens when you have to take the kids to soccer practice at 7 am? What happens if the special blue mug breaks? You're better off training yourself off those dependencies.
In other interviews, Cory has talked about how he built his writing career while he was working a demanding job that required a lot of business travel -- global business travel that does an special number on the circadian rhythm. He still found the time to write every day.
I travel a little bit, but not a lot, and part of finding my own personal rhythm is that I've given myself permission to take time off writing fiction if I've spent most of the day away from the keyboard, and especially if I didn't sleep in my own bed. But if I ever got a job that required a lot of travel, well, I'd have to learn how to write on the road or else I wouldn't get it done.