Distraction
Writing time is a fragile thing for me. I often have the attention span of a goldfish, so any small distraction is liable to turn a solid chunk of time that I’ve set aside for writing into something else entirely. I hesitate to say “wasted time,” but if we’re being honest, that’s often what it is.
I know that I when I write, I’ll be distracted much less if I isolate myself from the sources of external distraction, but there’s one that won’t go away without fundamentally altering my writing process: The Internet.
I wrote this post a little more than a year ago which shows an example of how the internet distracts me from writing, and the problem hasn’t gotten much better since then. The only solution I see is to disconnect from the internet while I’m trying to write, but as I mentioned above, that would totally change my writing process. I use the internet to do research when I think my writing requires it of me.
There’s a big myth that fiction writers don’t need to do research, which is entirely untrue. Each genre of fiction presents a whole host of topics that a writer should be familiar with in order to create an immersive world. For example, when I’m writing science fiction, I like to check on scientific laws, and technologies that do or don’t exist. Maybe it’s OK to not do the research right away in favor of going back to correct the details after most of the writing is done, but I’m not sure if I can be trusted to catch all of the inconsistencies that that might introduce. And I seriously don’t like inconsistency.
My problem seems to be that I like learning. When I stop writing to read up on a topic that I find interesting, chances are that I won’t go back to writing when I should. If I do return to writing, then it’s only a matter of time before the cycle repeats itself. The obvious solution here is to know everything before writing at all. That should work. All joking aside though, this is a difficult problem to fix. I’ll keep working at it, or else continue to be the most distracted writer on the planet.
Let me know what you think in the comments. Is the internet a necessary tool for work? And if so, how do you prevent yourself from being distracted?
69 Replies to “Distraction”
I totally agree that there is very much research and fact finding to do while writing fiction. There has to be enough grain of truth or non fictional material within your story to create something believable. And I agree that the internet is the best tool for that compared with the old laborious tools of encyclopedias . But the wormhole of information can suck you in and not spit you back out till hours have gone and not much has been accomplished. My thought is perhaps if you set an alarm on your phone or the stopwatch and give yourself a designated time before going off into a research reading tangent. Perhaps 15 to 20 minutes of true research will be more productive than hours of reading down the black hole of no return.
Thanks! That’s a pretty good idea. I’ll try it out!