Distracted - Joan Lennon

Charlie Chaplin in Pay Day (1922)

(wiki commons)

I am at the two thirds stage of writing a novel, and I am in the sludge.  I recognise this stage.  I know it's just a question of slogging on through.  I am not enjoying the slog.  And I am in the throes of excessive distractability.  So when I saw an article online on Nir Eval's theories about the nature of distraction, I downed tools and had a read.  (Okay, if I'm honest, I read a bit, got distracted, came back and read a bit more, got distracted ...)

I don't buy the whole package Nir Eyal is proposing - for example, I think that not everything we do is "prompted by the desire to escape discomfort." "It's pain all the way down" is not my kind of mantra.  But the nub of the argument - that distraction doesn't start with the technology out there - it starts with us - I certainly recognised.  

"We use these devices as psychological pacifiers as we are looking for an escape from uncomfortable sensations. And if we don't deal with that fact, we will always find distraction somewhere."

Part of dealing with that fact might be to find out what other people are saying about distraction.  There have been, for example, excellent ABBA posts on the topic - have a visit, for example, to Chitra Soundar's Seven Habits of a Highly Distracted Writer, Clementine Beauvais' On Not Trusting Your Future Self, or Andrew Strong's How to Be Creative.  (Go on - it's an educational and entertaining way of not getting down to, you know, the writing.)

But, yup, this distractability I acknowledge mine, to paraphrase the Bard.  Also, I have no magic cure.  I still have to do the slog, in order to get past the sludge.  I break it down into baby steps, use the timer, mark up every 100 words achieved, give myself tons of tiny treats, and distract the other people in the house who are also trying to write/draw with corking* challenges.

This too shall pass.  (Off now to find out where that comes from ...)

* Corking is a not-quite-yet-Olympic sport where you try to throw Prosecco corks into an empty cat food box from a distance.  Feelings run high.  It is eminently distracting.

Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.

Walking Mountain.

On not trusting your future self - Clémentine Beauvais

I’m writing this thanks to Cold Turkey, my faithful Internet-blocking software. I’ve used it for many years, and would not have finished any novel nor my thesis without it. For years, at 9 o’clock every morning, I’d switch it on for three and a half hours, shutting down all the websites I didn’t want to go on - leaving JStor and suchlike accessible - and then switch it on again at 2pm for another four hours.

Recently, though, I’ve had to upgrade to the Pro version. You see, it was getting increasingly difficult to actually switch on Cold Turkey at 9 o’clock, or again at 2pm. I’d let 9am go past, and then suddenly it was 9.13, and then you might as well wait till 9.30 because it’s a round number.

Now, with Cold Turkey Pro, I can schedule my whole week, or indeed month, in advance, and lock that schedule into place. Tomorrow’s Clementine can’t cheat. Ha!

Yep, it’s ridiculous that I paid 14 quid to prevent my sly, lazy future self from going on the Internet instead of working. In a way, I’m doing her a service: the satisfaction of getting into a ‘flow’, of writing or reading for hours on end, is always there, faithfully. But it mostly shows that I absolutely don't trust her to wait for that elusive second marshmallow; I know it won't be present enough to her greedy mind when the first marshmallow is sitting there looking lonely on the table.

We’re engaged, it seems, in a exhausting arms race: the world is getting better at distracting us, and in response it’s also getting better at providing weapons against distraction. Self-discipline is now dependent on a heavy apparatus of self-binding devices and pieces of software; on temptation-bundling; on wilfully not-buying certain items.

Ever since I was a young teenager, I’ve felt this arms race slowly growing. I’ve always been pretty self-disciplined, having gone through a stringent educational system with stacks of homework and a holy terror of teachers. 

But of course at the time the world didn’t offer much resistance to my seriousness. When I was in high school, my Nokia 3410 was the only distraction in the library, apart from handsome boys who, unfortunately, didn’t find me an equivalent source of distraction at all. It wasn’t hard to focus; plus we were scared, and being scared makes one very self-disciplined.

Then at university, I wasn’t scared anymore because British education isn’t psychotic like French education and terrifying teenagers into doing work isn’t considered the right approach. There I signed up for Facebook, but I only had a few friends. Then more. It was becoming tricky to focus, but at least when I took my computer to the library there was no Internet.

Then wifi appeared, and gradually became available pretty much everywhere.

When I started my PhD, it had become unmanageable. I was far from the only one who struggled; in fact I was probably among the more self-disciplined, thanks to the aforementioned years of French torture education. Soon Cold Turkey and its equivalent for Mac, Self-Control, became talked-of among students as you would talk about some kind of miracle medicine.

Like me, my friends were engineering increasingly complex traps to commit their future selves to work. It’s interesting to see how normal these strategies of trapping-your-future-self has become. We’ve learnt to live in constant suspicion that tomorrow’s selves, next week’s selves, will betray our present selves. They’re not to be trusted. 

One of my colleagues asks his wife to go to work with his (smart)phone when he needs to spend the day writing an article. Another has never installed broadband in her new studio flat. Another has returned to pen and paper. My own self-binding strategy has been to resist buying a smartphone; I still don’t have one.

All of these strategies certainly work, but leave us with the nagging feeling that they only help self-discipline in the same way as stabilisers help you cycle. Taking away all of these layers of self-commitment, I could probably continue to function as if they were there for a while; just like I’d probably carry on for a bit if the stabilisers suddenly vanished.

But I’d do so with a vague, unpleasant hunch that it would be extremely easy to fall to the side. And here my future self might look back and ask: 'You idiot! Why the hell did you never actually teach me to cycle?'

_____________________________________

Clementine Beauvais writes in French and English. She blogs here about children's literature and academia.

Keep Your Day Job - Heather Dyer

copyright Fountain_Head

“If only I had more time,” we often say, “I’d be able to finish my novel.” We feel that if only we could live the ideal ‘writer’s life’ (alone in an isolated cottage overlooking the sea, perhaps) we could write our masterpiece. But how many writers actually live this sort of life? And is it really helpful?
 
The truth is that not many writers can be productive for an eight-hour day. Personally, I can only manage two hours at most before I have to do some admin or run an errand. I might go back to my book later in the day, but I can’t write all day, every day. In fact, I have come to believe that pushing on before your work is ready can actually be counterproductive. It can mean taking your story down the wrong track, or not going deep enough.

Having a day job (or other responsibilities) means we have to do our writing in short bursts when we get the chance. But this has some advantages.

1. Being committed to non-writing activities frees up our unconscious, so that it can find solutions while our thinking brains are otherwise engaged. Trying to think our way out of a plot problem is rarely successful. Answers seem to come in the form of images or ideas that occur to us while we’re in the middle of doing something else

2. Something else that a day job can do for our writing is to help us take it less seriously. Having a day job means that writing can remain a labour of love; something that you do for fun, as opposed to something that you do because you have to. As Frank Cottrell Boyce says: "real creativity should feel like a game, not a career..."

3. A day job also means that we have to interact with the sort of people we might never otherwise meet – and since it is primarily through our interactions with others that we develop and mature, a day job can often provide our richest life experience and some of our best material.

Carol Lloyd, in her insightful book Creating a Life Worth Living, classifies day jobs into ‘No Contest’ jobs, ‘Wellspring’ jobs and ‘Big Tent’ jobs. Wellspring jobs (like copywriting or journalism) use the same skills you use in your own writing. These jobs may improve your technique, but can if too demanding they can sap your creativity, leaving none left for your own work. The No Contest job (working in a bookshop or gardening, for example) typically don’t require you to invest too much mental energy, but may not pay very well. Big Tent jobs involve working in the industry (like teaching creative writing or working in publishing) and can be useful for networking.

So, although we may dream about living the ‘writer’s life’, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the first requirement of being a writer is to live fully. The writer who cuts themselves off from the rest of the world may be limiting the source of their inspiration. A day job or family responsibilities can give us a sense of belonging and make us feel part of the world. And when you stop thinking about your writing, you allow unconscious to get to work on it. Most importantly a day job leaves our writing where it’s meant to be: somewhere we can escape to – a place where we can play. Perhaps having to fit our writing in around a day job isn’t such a bad thing after all?



Heather Dyer - children's author and Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

• For enquiries about creative writing workshops for children or adults, or editorial services, go to www.heatherdyer.co.uk
• For enquiries about academic writing workshops, go to:  http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/
  

How to be Creative - Andrew Strong

I’m not sure whether creativity is as complex as writers of books on creativity would like us to think, and books on creativity are not in short supply, which suggests that the writers of these books are not that creative, for if they were they’d write something on a subject other than creativity, something no one else has thought to tackle, for example, How to Speak Lobster or Dummies for Beginners.

From 1964 and Arthur Koestler’s monumental The Act of Creation to 2012 and Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine – How Creativity Works (later withdrawn as Lehrer was forced to admit he’d been a bit creative in the quotes he’d attributed to Bob Dylan) -  I have read a lot of these books and I can tell you - they don’t help.

Because what they don’t often say is this: creativity is just a sunny word for work.  Long ago, at art school, it was impressed upon me that artists have to understand how their chosen materials behave. Whether your materials are paint, stone or film, get inside the form, practise, work. You must understand your medium, and for writers, these are words, sentences, paragraphs and so on.

I kept journals for twenty years.  Five hundred words a day.  Whatever the weather, whatever I was doing, I wrote.  If I had nothing to say, I made things up.  If there was so much going on that I had no time to write, I would still write.  And then one day I looked at all the words that I’d written and thought, if I’d written novels, instead of journals, I might have something proper to show for all this writing.  So I stopped writing my journal and started writing a book.

Writing a book is hard, isn’t it?  It’s not easy starting, and it’s even harder to keep going. To write well there is no doubt you need to harness your creativity.  I noticed from the early chapters of my first book that I often harnessed my creativity to develop ways of fooling myself I was working when I actually wasn’t, and the three most brilliant diversions I came up with were notebooks, research and coffee.

The lure of the pristine notebook is very powerful: it’s so exciting shopping for one, you feel like you’re working when you’re not, of course, and you can even stop when out shopping for a notebook and have lunch. And once you’ve found the notebook, you can start thinking about a new pen.

Similarly, research. For me research is a way of reading interesting snippets on the internet without actually writing.  I can spend an hour just looking for a minor character’s name. I set my most recent book in a real city I’ve never visited. This was a cunning excuse to spend weeks on Google Street Search, going for imaginary cycle rides. 

But preparing coffee is the quintessential distraction. I have an elaborate coffee making ritual that lasts around twenty minutes.  I love those twenty minutes.  I can think about my writing, pretend I’m very close to actually writing, but be staring out of the window at a tree, or a bird.  If there were a job that involved staring at trees and birds, I would love it.  Although I’m sure that after a few months I’d be looking at ways of not actually staring at trees and birds but something related to it, like shopping for a notebook so I could jot down which trees and birds I intended to stare at for the next week or so.

You see, this is the problem with being creative. You end up creating so many forms of distraction that your whole day is spent making coffee, jotting in notebooks and conducting research. And just to make matters worse, you can add to this list of distractions reading books on how to be creative. And as I said, I’ve read lots of them.

There are wonderful things some of those books have taught me, and very few of them have failed to be interesting. Guy Claxton’s Hair Brain, Turtle Mind is good on the importance of allowing the mind to wander; Tor Norretranders’ The User Illusion – although more about consciousness than creativity, does say some astonishing things about how limiting conscious thinking can be.  I’d also recommend Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary – a huge work exploring how western cultures have become too conscious, too ‘left brained’, too restricted. 

These books, and many others, are compulsive, and all emphasise that creativity occurs unconsciously, and each, in its own way, suggests how we can set up the right conditions for allowing the unconscious mind to play with ideas and come up with something. But for all their insight, these books don’t really help, they just tend to confirm what I’ve suspected all along, which is this: I need to get on with it.

So if you came to this blog as a distraction from writing, stop reading now and get back to work. However, if you came because you hoped for a tip or advice, I’m not going to disappoint.  Here it is: if you're a writer and you want to be creative, go and write, go and write anything at all, even if it’s what you’d rather be doing instead of sitting down and writing. Just write and write and write, and eventually, if you’re lucky, something magical will happen and you’ll suddenly realise that you have something, and you won’t know how it happened.

I just hope it doesn’t turn out to be a book on creativity.

How to improve your working habits - by Nicola Morgan

Note 1: No shed necessary. That's a promise!

Note 2: Those who came to the SAS Conference in Peterborough this year know all about this and know that it's called Stimulus Generalisation

Working well shouldn’t be difficult. Make a list of things to do; tell yourself that you will do a, b and c before lunch; apply posterior to chair; do a, b and c. But most of us know what actually happens: in the absence of a boss to enforce when and where we produce a piece of work, bad habits come into play and we (I) play Spider Solitaire, go on Twitter, answer social emails, pay bills, make more coffee, dust behind the fridge…

That was me, until May 2011. Years of self-employment and working from home had created appallingly chaotic working habits. I got the work done – never missed a deadline yet – but it felt unhappily ill-disciplined, ineffective, pathetic. Social, domestic and work tasks were mixed up; the hours spent at my desk were too long and ineffective; real writing seemed to come last, if at all. Work-life not so much balance as collapsed in a heap of tangled intentions.

In May that changed. Now, if I say “shed”, you’ll roll your eyes and want to switch off, but I promise this is not about getting a writing shed. It’s about stimulus generalisation, as I now realise, thanks to my clinical psychologist friend who nodded wisely when I told her how my working habits changed instantly, the day I got a shed. Stimulus generalisation is something psychologists harness when dealing with addictions and negative habits, she said. Hmmm, sounds like me. Does it sound like you?

I’ll briefly explain the relevant aspects of stimulus generalisation but then, more importantly, unpick the elements of what I accidentally did, in order to make suggestions that anyone can use to alter poor working habits, including internet addiction. (Disclosure: I’m not a trained psychologist, though some of my work involves a degree of understanding of how our brains work; I’m just making sense of what happened to me and what might help others.)

Stimulus generalisation is akin to a Pavlovian response, although reflexes are not necessarily involved. Behaviour (leading to habits) is conditioned subconsciously by stimuli around us. So, if you tend to have a glass of wine while cooking the evening meal, cooking the evening meal becomes part of the set of triggers to have a glass of wine. Aspects of cooking the evening meal are the general stimuli around you: the clock saying 7pm, the light falling, the sound of a partner coming home, your own body clock, the smells in the kitchen, all the cues to anticipation of a relaxing evening. Together, these stimuli subconsciously reinforce a habit; and breaking the habit will be very hard if you don’t break the stimuli. In theory, you could just say, “I won’t have a glass of wine,” but the stimuli play heavily on your desires and behaviours and you are pretty likely to have that glass of wine. Thus speaks the voice of experience.

So, let’s unpick what happened with my shed. Effectively, I had suddenly changed almost all the stimuli around me, in one go. This made my existing desire to change working habits much easier; it enabled an immediate fresh slate, allowing new stimuli to create new habits. In the same way, an addict is encouraged, as part of therapy, to remove all physical aspects of the situations in which previously he took the addictive substance. Move house; throw away posters, furniture, possessions; avoid the friends who accompanied the addictive behaviour; take up new activities; change as much about your life and environs as possible. Every repeated stimulus has a hold on the person, each one like a strand within a rope.

Let’s move away from the specific shed example and generalise the conditions which may make new behaviours possible, conditions which any of us could replicate if we wanted to break undesired working habits.

1. Desire to change. We need to know what we want to change, and to want it strongly enough that we will make effort and think positively about the outcome. Part of this may involve feeling sufficiently negative about the current situation.

2. Planning ahead. Making detailed advance decisions about the changes, and setting a date on which the changes will start, help prime the mind to activate those changes.

3. Investment. It makes sense that if we have invested time, money and/or effort in the changes, this will help motivation.

4. Rising anticipation. If we have to wait eagerly for the start date, this is likely to help.

5. Support from others. Support from partner, family or friends, and their own investment in your success, are likely to have a positive effect.

6. Out with the old and in with the new. The tendency of the brain towards stimulus generalisation means that the more physical surroundings you can change, the better. You may not be able to afford a whole new room, or to replace all the furniture in it, but the more you can alter the physical surroundings, the better.

7. The use of all the senses. Our brains learn best when several senses are used. 

8. Blitzing it. I suspect that doing it all at once makes a greater impact.

Based on those principles, there follow some specific suggestions to help change working habits. Some are small and may seem trivial but your brain will notice more than you think. Some of the larger things won’t be practical for everyone and I’m not suggesting anyone does them all: pick a few that suit your situation; plan when to instigate the new regime; then do them all at once. Remember: once you have selected your new stimuli, make sure you apply them to your working hours, not your social or domestic hours. The point is to use a specific setting to teach your brain that it is supposed to be working, not doing social or domestic tasks. Or playing Spider Solitaire… The new environment will perform the role of a boss.

Suggestions:

o Move your work-space to a different room.

o Rearrange the furniture in your work-space, including the position of your desk and your view.

o Redecorate with new colours, changing as much as possible.

o Choose new furniture, particularly chair and desk and whatever is in your range of sight while working.

o Create a time-table for arriving and leaving work; leave your office door open if just taking a break, but close it (lock it?) when your working day ends. Make sure you take everything you will need during the evening, just as if you worked away from home; use a briefcase?!

o Have a separate in-tray for domestic/social tasks, and only deal with them outside working hours.

o Even something small can help, such as using a specific mug during working hours, or a particular pen or notebook for “real” writing.

o Anything separate for “work” use will help: stationery, clothes, shelves, diary, etc. Make use of the visual element: eg if you use blue files for work docs, have only the blue files in front of you during work hours or in your work space.

o Use all the senses. The suggestions above are all about what you can see but consider the following: you might play music when working (or when not working); you might harness the sense of smell by lighting a scented candle when doing writing work, or enjoy the smell and taste of real coffee; and yes, you have my permission to eat chocolate to herald the start of a writing session… Anything that you can commit to doing every time you start what is supposed to be a proper working (or writing) session.

The more we can change, the more coherently we plan the changes and the more simultaneously we effect them all, the easier it is for our brain to break old habits and allow new behaviours.

But you’ve got to want to, as much as I wanted that shed, and you’ve got to keep wanting it. Old habits not only die hard, they can return. Be vigilant!

By the way, a new edition of my book, BLAME MY BRAIN - The Teenage Brain Revealed, is available from May, also with an ebook version.