Ep. 174: Rachael on Getting Your Writing Done When Life is Distracting

Ep. 174: Rachael on Getting Your Writing Done When Life is Distracting

Crazy times call for crazy (or totally sensible, whatever) solutions.

The Roost laptop holder (way more expensive than I remembered, but still worth it): https://amzn.to/2J2af3K

Transcript

Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #174 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron.

[00:00:20] I am so pleased that you are with me today in these end of days, also known as The epoch of time when women stopped wearing bras. Cause we never have to again cause we’re never leaving the house. But honestly, this podcast is not about Coronavirus ‘cause you know what? Everybody else is talking about it and you’re tired of hearing about it. I know I am. So today we’re going to talk about writing and we are specifically going to talk about how to get it done. When times or your life might be a little bit rough for whatever reason, there’s a lot of people going through rough things that have nothing to do with a virus. And we are creators, we are still writers no matter what is going on in our life. And we have to have tools to be able to get our work done. 

[00:01:11] So we’re going to talk about that today. No guests, just me. So getting into that, but before we do that, I just want a little bit of a catch up of what’s going on around here. I am still on, incredible deadline. Boy, it is not going to be easy to finish this book in time. The good thing is, I don’t think my editor listens to the podcast and I bet I could get an extension if I wanted one. However, I don’t want one unless I get one at the very, very last minute. I have never turned a book in late because I believe that if you ask for and receive an extension, it is therefore not late. But I hate asking for extensions. I’ve only done it a couple of times, but if I asked for one today when my book is still three and a half weeks away from being due. If I asked for like a week extension, then I would somehow fritter away a week. I know I would do it. I know myself that well, and I know that in a week I would be three and a half weeks away from getting the book done and still in the exact same position. So if I am going to ask for an extension, it will be at the very last minute. So I will keep you updated on how I do. But honestly, work has been going great.  I have been writing a lot. I have been really diligent about getting the words done and yes, I’m on deadline and that helps me a lot. However, I have had to come up with some focusing tools because I have never been able to write first drafts in my home. Probably, I don’t think I’ve written a first draft in my home for 10 years. I’ve always written the first draft outside of my house, any part of it, and a lot of their revision usually I do most of the revision out of the house too. That’s always been either a coffee shop or mills library. I got a co-working space just a few weeks ago, which I have now cancelled for the time being anyway, because I can’t use it. So I’m really back in the house and I have to be doing this dedicated writing time that I’ve never done in my home. I’m very comfortable doing everything else in my home. All the business stuff, but not the first drafting and usually not the revising either. So I’ve had to figure out some hacks and workarounds to get me to a place where I can do that ‘cause I don’t have a choice right now, and I wanted to share those with you, so that’s been going awesome. I will share those things with you. 

[00:03:35] What else has been happening around here? Well, that’s kind of about it. I do have a new Patreon supporter, Michelle White. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining the Patreon, you can always look at that @ patreon.com/rachael. She is now going to get all of the essays that I write and don’t go anywhere- they don’t go anywhere else. They will eventually all be published in books, and I have never done that with any of them. So there’s more than 30 essays. There’s more than 150,000 words that is some of my best work I’ve ever done, over in the Patreon file that you could get, you could technically get for $1 for one month, read them all, and then unpledged but that’s just a dollar worth of 150,000 words of, non-creative nonfiction that I’ve thought really deeply about a lot of memoir pieces, including me talking about my relapse a month and a half ago that I’m really not talking about anywhere else. So, I just reread that essay actually, and I’m proud of it. So that’s over there. If you’d like to join, you can. I actually suckered her into it. She wrote me an email and said that she read my book, A Letters to an Aspiring Author. I think that’s what it’s called. My amazing assistant Ed, talked me into changing the title of that book. So I think it’s called Letters to an Aspiring Author, and she read that, and then she got, she told me in an email that she got suckered into joining my Patreon. So yes! So you should go get letters. There is a free preview available on all platforms right now. The free preview is available for letters You can download that to any device, and if you click on the paperback version of the book itself, it shows a jacket. I think we finally got it fixed, but on Kindle, everything was right except for the picture of the book, which showed a rain jacket. And I have to say that this is not the first time that our rain jacket has shown on the paperback version of my book. It happened on another book. It was a romance, a couple of years ago. Amazon didn’t understand it this time and they didn’t understand it then. So, my books don’t just have jackets. They have rain jackets is what I’m going to say from here on out. 

[00:05:53] So I don’t think I’m going to do any kind of middle promo to stick in the middle between me doing the catch up and me doing the talking portion. So we’ll just jump right into it. So the things that have helped me honestly, something that has really helped me the most recently is to let go of my incredible, aspirational morning routine, which looks like a lot of meditation. It looks like a bunch of yoga; it has eating good foods. It has getting up very early. It often has going to a recovery meeting, can’t go to any recovery meetings, they’re all canceled. So, all of that is kind of out the window and I am kind of looking at myself as a new person and what, what does work for my body? I’ve always said that I’m a very, very early person, early riser, but I’m not naturally, like when my alarm goes off at 5 or 5:30 or 4:30 on Tuesdays. I am not happy. It’s not an easy feeling, and I wake up feeling out of sorts. So recently I’ve been letting myself sleep until I need to, which has been more like around 8:00 AM, which is kind of great. If I would like to eventually narrow my work window to – from 9 to 5, I would like to work from 9 to 5, without a lunch break ‘cause I never take a break but no more than that. Usually I’m working something like 7:30 or 8 until 6 or 7 at night, and I want to narrow that to 9 to 5. So why shouldn’t I get up at eight o’clock? So my routine has changed from self-flagellation trying to do all the things and be the perfect human being to these simple steps, which I stole from my friend Jay Wells. Because they’re simple and they’re doable. I drink a glass of water. Because I’m dehydrated, when I wake up, everybody is, I drink one glass of water, I’ll make a cup of tea. I take it into my office and I sit down and this has been key for me. I have gotten back into doing morning meditation every morning and I sit down. And I meditate for 20 minutes. You, if you’re going to try this, you might want to try it for 5 minutes or 10 minutes. 20 is kind of long, I think 30’s heck a long 45 is crazy, but 20 for me is a really nice amount of time and if you are listening to this and saying, I don’t meditate, I can’t meditate, my brain is too busy. I’ve never been able to do that. Welcome to the rest of us. We all feel that way. Our brains are all too busy to meditate. There’s no such thing as finding calm in the brain. Well, there is a little bit, but- but there’s no such thing as quieting your brain in sitting down and being able to quiet it. That’s not what happens. 

[00:08:42] Here is my breakdown, I’ve done it on the podcast before, but I’ll do it again. My very quick three-step breakdown of meditation. You sit or you lie down in whatever position is comfortable to you. That’s step number one. Step two, you focus on something. A lot of people like to focus on the feeling of the breath because it’s always there, it’s always accessible. When I think about my breath, I usually think about it right about the solar plexus and just kind of feel my, the upper part of my abdomen moving in and out and just kind of, just kind of think about what that feels like. Other people concentrate on what the breath feels like at the tip of their nose, or the back of their throat. Sometimes mind moves around. Oftentimes I will count it to 10 and then start over. So I have something kind of to hang on to. But you focus on something, you can focus on a candle, you can focus on the way your butt feels, where you’re sitting.  Just focus on one thing. That’s step two, focus on one thing. And step three is get distracted. Step three, normally happens within about a quarter of a second for a lot of my meditation, I will focus on my breath. Then a quarter of a second later, I’m out again. I’m thinking about something else that is part of meditation, that getting distracted. The real magic of meditation is the place between getting distracted and coming back to your focus. That realization that you have become distracted, and the moment of focusing on your focal point, that is meditation. The memory of coming back. And what that does, it is mental gymnastics. It doesn’t have to be spiritual, it doesn’t have to be anything other than agnostic mental, pushups. You are getting stronger at being able to stay at your desk, writing for longer periods of time without getting distracted. So I’ve been doing that. 

[00:10:32] But the other thing I’ve really been doing that has been working so well, and it’s so obvious, a 27th book, I should know these things by heart. Eliminating distractions is something I have to do, and apparently, oh my God, it’s so obvious, so obvious. This is what I’ve been doing. But this is what I’ve been doing when I go to cafes or mills, I am eliminating distractions, not always visual distractions, because I like being at cafes and being able to see people or look out the window at mills and see people walking by. I enjoy that kind of distraction. But at my house, I never really understood how many distractions there were, really, especially the animals. We have two dogs and two cats and the cats basically just go in a round Robin of jump on my lap, jump off, jump on my lap, jump off. The dogs are always wanting to come in and out and managing those distractions- Oh my God, if you have kids, Jesus, especially if they’re home right now. Wow! Managing distraction is our number one job when it comes to getting our words done. And guess what? I am in the privileged position of owning a door. If you’re watching it on YouTube, it’s right behind me. That door does not shut. It never has, never been, you know, level with the house or something. I can’t shut it and the animals let themselves in and out at well. So this week, I have just taken to shoving this piece of wood that I don’t even need to explain. It’s like a balanced board. I shove it under the door and I lock out all the animals and it has been a life changer. If you do not have a room with a door, to do your writing is, guess what? You have a bathroom. And if it takes putting your kids in front of the television with extra TV time and lying to your husband and saying, honey, I’m going to go watch an episode of Vander Puff Rules in the tub, actually I don’t advocate lying. I can’t even lie well, so- but some of you might have to going to the bathroom and closing the door and getting 15 minutes of writing done, 30 minutes of writing done as fast as your little fingers can type. That works too. I think we have to be behind a door. I’ve always thought and said that I think I can work well being distracted and I just can’t because this week I have been at home. I have been closing the door. 

[00:13:00] Another thing that keeps me away, keeps distraction away from me, is the sound that I put into my ears. And I use a Mac and I use an app called White Noise, and I’ve talked about this before too, but I’ll bring it up again. I like it because I can play it through my headphones at the same time and playing other things. So I use the pink noise, mixed with rain, which is a really pleasant sound. So that’s always going at a low drone when I’m writing and not when I’m doing anything else. As soon as I start to do email, if I’m done writing, as soon as I start to do email and make sure I pull my headphones out and I’m not listening to these sounds, I want these sounds to be associated with my writing and that only I have been listening. Also at the same time to Spotify, I’m making a playlist out of songs for me, they have no words. And what I’ll do is, I’ll find a song that I love. I’ll make a song radio out of it. And then I listened to it when I’m writing and the moment I realized that a new song has started that I hate and it’s taken me out of the moment, it’s kind of like meditation. I go back to the song right before it, I play it again and make sure it’s one of those songs that I can just go really deep and focus while it’s on, and I drag it over to the permanent playlist for that book. The permanent playlist for the book I’m working on right now only has four songs, and I can loop those songs over and over and over and over again. And I don’t get tired of them because I’m not listening to them. They are songs that have proven themselves to be a place where I get lost, so I put it in my pink/rain noise and that particular four song playlist that works for this book in this book only. And now I have locked out any sound from the rest of the house with the dog barks, or if my wife walks by the door grumbling. She doesn’t actually grumble. I’m the grumbler in the family. I have to say that. I don’t hear it; those distractions have been blocked out. 

[00:14:57] And another woo-woo thing, is just straight up woo-woo y’all, that I’ve been doing, is I’ve been making sure to light a candle. I have a friend who makes these incredible, I like the tall votive candle. She, this is, if we’re watching on YouTube, it’s covered with angels, has gotten glitter inside, and I just light it only when I’m writing. If I take a half an hour break or an hour break between writing sessions, I blow it out, I snuff it out. And then I light it again when I start writing again. And I only do that when I’m writing or revising. And I literally light it and say, Hello muse, ‘cause I do believe in creative energy and allowing it to come to us. And I know that’s woo-woo! It’s okay though.  I’m not praying to any kind of goddess to come visit me because I believe that the muse is always with us when we’re working. For me, all of my inspiration and ideas and great sentences only happen when I’m writing. I don’t get good ideas when I’m just sitting around hoping to get good ideas. I get them when I’m doing the work and I’m failing and flailing at doing the work. Ideas start to come that will later help me fix this book. So I now have a closed door. I have a candle burning. I have the music in my ears. I have done my meditation. So I am centered and kind of calm and ready to do exactly what I do in meditation, which is I think about the words, I may get a little distracted for a second and then I think about the words, because my brain has been practicing, getting distracted and coming back to the focal point, which while I’m writing is doing the writing itself. And this has been working so, so, so well for me. 

[00:16:49] One other thing that is on my list here that I wanted to make sure I talked about is that my desk, I said at this roll top desk. It’s fabulous for doing all my work and my podcasting and everything else like that. It is absolutely wrong though, for doing the writing work. It’s good for the business work. It’s not good for the writing work. It’s completely ergonomically incorrect. And so I have just been manipulating that because I have to, right now, there’s nothing else I can do. So yesterday I sat on three pillows and put pillows on the floor so that my feet were supported underneath me. That’s what I’ve been doing. This week and part of last week. Today though, my wife found this little laptop desk thing that is from Amazon, I think. And you can kind of pull it onto the chair where you are. And I have a perfect place in my office for it, and it is low enough that. All of a sudden, I’m completely ergonomically correct and I was starting to get wrist pain from writing on at the wrong level, and that’s just taken it away. Plus, I get to look out the window while I’m writing, which is something I very, very much like to do. Like I said, for me, that is not a distraction. If it is a distraction for you, then face a blank wall, but make sure that your elbows are at that 90-degree position. I have a real cheap, well, such wasn’t cheap, maybe $30 or so, this folding collapsible umbrella of a laptop lifter. I will try to remember to put the link for it in the show notes because it’s fabulous. It folds up and I, I fit into my tiny little backpack that I take with my tiny little computer, and that’s my whole office, but that’s why it’s raised right now because I’m always using, a detachable keyboard and mouse to work on my laptop, which is raised perfectly. My dog is chewing on something behind me. 

[00:18:36] So getting the ergo right, wherever you’re writing is really important too. And getting those things dialed is part of your getting your work done. You have to get these things dialed and 24/7 books later, I am still always trying to get things in the right way to make them work for me. But these have been working for me, so if you try any of these things, let me know. And remember, I didn’t even say this, but it’s probably the number one thing. Definitely just click your Wi-Fi off when you start to write, if you are of strong- if you’re just used to doing this work, you don’t have to. I don’t have to anymore ‘cause I do not look at E-mail or Facebook or Twitter or whatever else I could look at. I’m trained not to, but if you accidentally click over and see something, turn off the Wi-Fi just for the time you’re writing. You do not need to look up anything when you’re writing. You can look it up later when you’re done with this thousand words or these 500 words or whatever it is your work writing at that moment.

[00:19:37] So try these things out and let me know how it’s going, where you are, where you are finding yourself writing, because a lot of you might be having to write at home, in a place you haven’t written in a while, or you might be struggling to write around your entire family who is suddenly home with you. So I would love to know how that is working out for you and what some of your hacks might be. You can hit me over www.howdoyouwrite.net and if you go into this particular show, which will be the latest one, I will put the holding keyboard holder, sorry, holding laptop folder that I love so, so, so much and I wish you all very happy writing and very good health and happiness and I hope that you are getting some of your work done and that you’ll come and tell me about it. Okay, my friends. Bye. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.