Insecure Writers' Support Group - May

 It's the first Wednesday in May so it's time for the Insecure Writers' Support Groups!

The awesome co-hosts for the May 1 posting of the IWSG are Victoria Marie Lees, Kim Lajevardi, Nancy Gideon, and Cathrina Constantine!

This month's question is a very relevant one!

How do you deal with distractions when you are writing? Do they derail you?

Distractions are all too common, everywhere, whether it's when I'm doing my own writing, or trying to perfectly word an email or funding application at work.  The trick is to try and minimize them as much as possible so you can make the most out of the limited writing time available.

For example, I sometimes take a day off work just to write.  To make sure I get the most out of this day, I don't write at home where there are always chores that need attending to.  I'll go to the library with my laptop and find a nice quiet corner in which to park myself for the day.  I turn the wifi off too, so emails and notifications won't come through and distract me from my work.

I also turn the sound off on my phone no I don't hear those notifications coming through either.  I can look at that stuff when I take a break every few hours.  There's unlikely to be anything so urgent it can't wait a few hours, right?

So that's how I try to keep distraction at bay.  But once you have been distracted, how to get focused back on what you're doing?  Sometimes I  accept that it's time to take a break and use that break in concentration to get up, walk around, take a few minutes away from the page I'm working on.  But then I get back to it.  Maybe I have to go back and read a paragraph or two of what comes before the place I got distracted to find my way back into the flow.  Sometimes I can just dive back in, but I usually need a little intro back into the world of my story.

Listening to music can help keep distraction at bay.  I find I can't listen to music with lyrics I understand while I'm writing because they distract me from the words I'm writing, but music without lyrics can help block the outside world, or music with lyrics in languages I don't speak.  I have a few classical music playlists that I like to listen to when writing, one which is very big and dramatic, and one that is more serene.  I've also been listening to a lot of music from the Middle East recently, with lyrics in Urdu or Arabic.

At the end of the day, how big the distraction is will have an effect on how easy it is to get back into the writing flow.  If you take a phone call and it's something you can just brush off or deal with later, that's one thing.  Getting a call from your kid's teacher asking you to come and see them after school can be more distracting because then you'll be thinking about that and wondering what the hell the kid has done now,

Sometimes I just have to accept that I'm not going to get back to that chapter today.  My brain has moved away from the story and is now focused on  something else.  I like to make sure I leave each writing session with something slightly unfinished on a page to guide me to where I need to start next time, so stopping midway through something is often helpful for me.  I never stop writing for the day at the end of a chapter, for example.  I will always write at least a couple of sentences of the next one before I close the laptop so I'm not staring at a blank page when I open it again.  

Getting distracted to the point I have to stop for the day often leaves me mid-sentence or mid-paragraph - the perfect place to pick up again next time.

How do you deal with distraction?