I’ve been around long enough to have collected a lot of writer friends. Over the course of the past several years — and this predates the Covid pandemic — many of us have experienced difficulty writing.
Writing requires major amounts of concentration and focus. You cannot craft good, readable prose if you’re going along word by word. A complete thought has to be clearly defined in a writer’s mind to get the words onto the page. I’m not suggesting that it comes out perfectly, but it has to at least be complete.
If you’ve followed my posts for the past few years, I think it’s become pretty clear that I’m having difficulty writing. Hell, I’ve written a complete, full-length novel in 11 weeks. Right now I’m stumbling along working on a novel I began almost six years ago.
Why?
This past weekend I think I figured out what’s going wrong. There’s too much turmoil in the world.
Sitting down to write whether it was in my home office, in a library, even on transit, I developed a level of concentration that allowed me to work no matter what was going on around me.
No more. That skill has completely abandoned me. Even when I was away for a few days recently and there was no one around to bother me, no internet, no email, and my cell turned off, I couldn’t manage more than a half-hour of good concentration. I was restless and distracted no matter how hard I tried.
Outside thoughts, meaning outside of what I was trying to write, kept intruding into my brain. It was almost as if someone was firing a ray containing a newsfeed of distracting, well, BS as far as I was concerned. I could not shut it off.
It left me feeling frustrated and unhappy, two things that are not conducive to good writing.
In asking around, I’m finding that I’m not alone. One friend describes it as “the world is too present inside us.” I think that hits the nail squarely on the head.
What to do? The same friend suggested just sitting down to write and go where the muse takes you, even if it comes out more like a poor stream of consciousness. “Certainly don’t attempt anything with your WIP. You’re trying to clear your mind and get your focus back.
Writing used to be for me a way to shut out the world and focus on my own imaginary world, hang out with my invisible friends and share in their lives.
You know those newsfeeds like CNN or Fox News that are shown in waiting rooms or airports? That’s what it’s like inside my head.
“You have to learn how to shut that off,” said my good friend in a final bit of advice.
I answered, “Easier said than done, I think.”
“You have to keep trying. What else is there to do?”
She’s right.
