I am reading The War of Art at the moment and I have had a realisation.
The opening of the book talks about ‘Resistance’. I considered skipping ahead. I thought, ‘I’m not resistant to writing. I do it every day.’ But, recently, I have started letting the Web eat my creativity and slice up my morning writing time into tiny ten-minute slivers.
I realised that my form of Resistance is checking email, tweeting and ‘researching’ on the Web while I am writing. As the writer Dave Eggers says in a quote that I love:
‘Writing is a deep sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can’t ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn’t written anything for a year.’
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| Rainbow captured in Camera + app. |
So I’ve stopped. If I pause for a moment I’m trying to go for a walk, throw something for the dog, read something, but stay away from the Web, my major form of Resistance. If I tweet between 6am and midday now, it’ll be something interesting I’ve found and scheduled earlier.
Will update you on progress. (I’m one day into my trial ;-)) And g’luck with beating your own resistance to whatever it is. The book is well worth a read for all kinds of procrastination, not just creative.
It's a big thing to admit, even when you want to be sure that your web activity helps your writing and your career as well (which I know yours does!)
But when you're writing, you have to do it for real solid blocks, and you have to block off the online world to do so. When writing, I shut down all browsers (Scrivener open only, and Rdio app), and I'd turn off the wireless if it didn't supply my music now! But you have to get away from that other stream… maybe one hours, maybe five. It's the only way to make the writing happen…
Agreed! Hope the words are flowing for you. I'm still being pretty good on the above. Have had a productive few days on current projects. Three hours on one, two on another each day.