I woke this morning a whirlwind of productivity. With everyone else either at work or still in bed I had the peace of quiet of solitude to get caught up on how embarrassingly behind schedule I am, esspecialy considering I’ve not been at work all week.
Cut to a few hours later, when people started coming home from work, or getting out of bed, and my drive suddenly flew out of the front door. I found myself sat there, struggling to string two sentences together as people milled about around me, making themselves breakfast or vacuuming.
It’s a strange situation, because nobody was actively vying for my attention, and yet I was utterly unable concentrate on any of my posts for the blog. It’s a longstanding issue I’ve always had to deal with when doing anything creative. I’m just too prone to distractions, like a cat surrounded by a forest of dangling thread, any little thing suddenly take me out of the mindset that had me focusing like a laser beam.
Maybe it’s some mild form of OCD, in which I can’t concentrate on a task if there is something, anything to distract my attention. It suppose it supports the stereotype of the lone writer, locked up in the dark on their own. As I write this now, my dog, who normally takes an utter disinterest in me most of the time suddenly demands my attention.
Despite the image I may have been painting above, ironically, my best writing environment is in a place where I don’t have any control. As weird as that sounds.
If I’m somewhere outside the house, in a public library or on my break at work, I suddenly have 150% the creativity and motivation I ever seem to have when I’m at home. I honestly understand the people you see on their laptops in coffee shops and other public places doing it.
As a younger, dumber person, it would be the kind of thing I’d laugh at. When in reality it was the kind of thing I would love to do, but wouldn’t ever actually do thanks to a crippling case of self consciousnesses and anxiety.
In the end, I think the message to be taken from his ramble is that forcing writing anything is a bad idea, I am guilty of doing it sometimes, but if you really care about doing something and doing it well, then you owe it to yourself to create the ideal environment for yourself and your process.
It’s a piece of advice I really need to take myself. I have found myself in a bit of a rut lately. I’m not really sure if I’ve spoken about this at all on my blog. But I’m in the middle of buying my own home for the first time.
A flat I made an offer for in October, and I still haven’t been given a date that I can move in on. So I’m living out of boxes for what is apparently one of the worst moving experecnes anybody I know has ever heard of. I constantly feel like I’m waiting for something to happen. I just need to take my own advice and put myself in a place where I can really buckle down and focus.
Just embrace being that guy who sits in a coffee shop all day on his Macbook and to hell with what anyone thinks of me.
A Richard Wood Text Adventure 