Temptations That Pull Us From Routine

We’ve spent several weeks looking at obstacles to creating a daily writing habit and how to overcome them. This is the last in that series: temptations that pull us from routine.

First, there are all the things that can seem more important than writing. This can vary from the pile of dirty dishes to a friend’s invitation to lunch to a competing passion to a paying job to other kinds of obligations (such as kids and their school, community, family, household, and on and on). Many of these are wonderful things in and of themselves. We need friends; we want to enjoy our families, take care of our houses, do the work for which we get paid.

Then there are the things that lure us away, the temptations, also known as distractions.

Reading is a big one, for me, especially because reading can seem so close to writing and so virtuous and delicious all at once that it can seem almost as if I am writing.

People tend to think that if you are writing you have free time you just haven’t thought to fill in some other way, and they will come up with a way for you to fill it.

The internet is our current favorite distraction—we like to get on it and tell each other how alienating it is. It can seem like writing, too—look, I’m posting a fragment of a story, a description!

Here’s the big news: only writing is writing. Only sitting at your screen or with your notebook and putting words down on the page or staring off into space waiting for the words to come count as writing. Reading doesn’t count, even reading research or plot books. Talking about your book, doing internet research about your book, asking for advice about your book, even reading this blog—these do not count as writing. They might or might not help your writing, inspire your writing, structure your writing. But in themselves, they are not your writing.

And what you are doing is writing every day. Every day.

The easiest way to avoid distraction is to write first—as early as you can. This is not always as early as you’d like. Sometimes it involves putting the kids through their paces and getting them off to school. For example. For me. Although sometimes I get up before the kids with enough time both to meditate and to write, and that is bliss.

But certainly, I highly recommend that you write before you check your email, engage the social networks or take up other pure distractions.

But do not let time become another distraction. If you have to write on your lunch break or in the evening, do it then. Do it when you are tired. I wrote a draft of a novel in about six weeks when my children were both under one-year-old. I learned so much doing that, including how much my awake self gets in my own way. What barriers drop when you are almost asleep! What invention ensues!

It’s silly, but the only way to write is to sit down with absolutely nothing else to do for a set amount of time and just stay there. There was a point where Leo would get all worked up at bed time and not go to sleep. My sister told me, “Just bore him to sleep.” Don’t play, react, interact. Well, you can bore yourself into telling a story, too. Stop doing anything else and write.

What gets in your way? What lures you away? How have you found ways to create an oasis for your writing?