So yesterday was day one, the first day of the rest of my life, the day I started my writing properly (or finished my novel?) after years of not being able to put it first. And what happens? The handyman comes round (the one we’ve been trying to book for months) to repair the floor and put shelves up and the bathroom cabinet. Cue lots of drilling, a radio, banging etc. And guess what? The same thing has been happening today: more people at the house, plus I had to spray mould remover in the bathroom and am feeling light headed from the fumes, plus I’m trying to sort out my writing shed and this involves complicated mathematics relating to the quote and contacting people to level the ground and general project management stuff. In other words: just as I was ready to start my new life: distractions happened. Not only the usual distractions: the need for coffee or the postie knocking at the door, but big time drilling and hammering, like external manifestations of the frustration I’ve been feeling about not doing it.
So, then, you could call the idea that a writer needs to concentrate, focus, operate distraction-free, as (a) pretty reasonable in a practical sense, or (b) a misunderstanding of the role of the writer as a whole, or (c) a pernicious reiteration of the myth that you have to be upper middle class, beautiful, independently wealthy, and living in a beautiful house (with a Nanny and a pool attendant maybe) to be a writer. Whether you’d go for a, b, or c depends on your perspective.
Let’s look at option (a) for a moment. Focus is important. If you don’t get enough focus time as a creative practitioner, you’ll get ill. Pent up frustration about lack of focus will make you grumpy at the very least. Here’s the but: you don’t have to focus for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. You need enough focus time. So option (a) is true – boy is it true – but listen to the nuance of that word enough.
What about option (b)? Well, the writer’s job, if you like, is a whole package, just like any job. (You might not want to treat writing like a job – that’s another debate though.) Focus time while you are drafting, redrafting and editing is a very important part of that job. But so is planning. And actually the pantsers / planners thing (also another debate) misses this idea. You have to plan all the way through, not only at the start. You have to project manage. You have to organise. You have to get people to notice you (if you want to, of course). You don’t necessarily need the same amount of focus to do those things as you do for drafting.
Option (c)? There are different versions of this myth. They’re always to do with what you ‘have to be like’ or what your environment ‘has to be like’. (You need to be a gritty working-class ex-policeman to write a thriller is another version.) The worst aspect of the myth is when it’s unexamined, when you don’t know that you have partially or wholly accepted this myth, and it’s stopping you from writing. Actually you don’t ‘have to be’ anyone or anywhere other than who you are and where you are right now.
Yesterday, during the drilling, I organised the folders and files on my computer, and I finished it off between 6 and 8 this morning – yes, it was that bad. Procrastination, you might say, if you think writing is all about the focus. But here’s the thing: I really needed to organise the folders and files on my computer. And: I really love the drafting part of writing. I love focus time. I’m probably addicted to it. I’m not the real me when I don’t get it. So if I got focus time on day one + nothing else to do, I would immerse myself in my writing and emerge bleary eyed (and wondering why I was dehydrated) when it was time for school pick up. I’m not saying I don’t find it hard, I do, but I wouldn’t have organised the folders and files on my computer. Now I can FIND the drafts of the chapters I’m writing. I’ve deleted files I don’t need and archived the old stuff. My computer is quicker. I feel lighter, as if I was carrying all that extra stuff around with me and now I’ve put it down. So the benefit of distractions = I did some project management; I organised.