Taking breaks for attentional drift (The week in writing, July 21-27)

Monday:

Writing went well on Monday. I pressed out a good volume of work over three short chunks of time, five minute breaks between. The first chunk of work lasted for 21 minutes, the second chunk lasted for 24 minutes, and the third for 23 minutes. It's somewhat surprising that the work flowed like this, given that I hadn't planned exactly when and how I would sit down, and I hadn't planned exactly what I would write.

I have a natural rhythm in the morning. I wake up, walk across the room to turn off the alarm, and in the same motion I head to the bathroom. I return to let the dog out of her crate, I take her out to the living room and make her comfortable on the couch (this involves several blankets), and, finally, I get dressed. Getting dressed includes putting my shoes on, and it was only at the moment of shoving foot in shoe that I realized last week's break design was inherently flawed; how can I use a break to don shoes that are already on my feet? I resolved to figure it out later.

Once I'm dressed, I usually make breakfast and coffee, and my normal, automatic habit is to put earbuds in my ears and turn on some sort of audio – a podcast, an audiobook, a YouTube video.

This is the setup for a frequent obstacle I encounter to personal work in the mornings. If I don't have somewhere to be, a hard exit that forces me to turn the audio off and walk out the door, then it's not unusual to find myself sitting on the couch and looking at the phone long past the point when my plate and cup are empty. I do still make it to the desk, most of the time, but these little schedule bumps can snowball, and the sum total of several minor distractions can sometimes create a major issue. It's one of the easiest ways to derail my writing for the day. If I find myself running late when I do need to get somewhere, that's the most common circumstance under which I skip writing all together.

I often wonder how I might perfect the exact steps I take from wake-up to writing desk sit-down. I've tried self-imposing sets of strict rules on the mornings, mostly to limited success. Staying loose and leaving it to fate doesn't work either. On Monday, I listened to a podcast while I made food and coffee, and when I sat on the couch to eat, I switched to reading nonfiction (The Work of Art by Adam Moss). I came to a natural stopping point a minute or two after I finished my coffee, and I simply got up and sat down at the desk.

I think the podcast and the reading worked well to hold my attention while it needed to be held, but avoided absorbing me too deeply. Neither were narrative. It's easy for me to get sucked into a good story.

I'm sure all of this sounds simple and mundane, but "simple" and "mundane" automatically equate to "easy" and "unimportant." In my experience, the process of recognizing habitual impulses and attempting to exert control over them is one of the hardest, most frustrating things I can do. But in those small, difficult details lie the answers to some really important questions, like, "How do I reliably open myself to creative output every single day?"

Monday went well. Tuesday's work is to show up and do the same thing. How hard could that be?

Tuesday:

Pretty hard, it turns out.

It all started according to plan. I finished sipping my coffee, and my dog was sitting very sweetly in my lap. I thought, I'll spend just a couple more minutes here on the couch. I thought of a video my wife told me to watch, and I opened YouTube.

A fatal mistake, as far as my attention is concerned. Casually opening YouTube is like strolling into a minefield of distraction. Perhaps I'm making this seem more dire than it was. I watched two or three videos before I moved to the desk and began writing. But I'd like to hone this routine. Make it feel more sacred than it currently feels. Anyone have advice on conjuring a sense of sanctity? I'd like to build a mental fortress, but right now it's more like a dilapidated fence.

Concerning the week's experiment, writing in chunks with short breaks continued well. I also had success writing in a dialogue-heavy approach on Monday and Tuesday, inspired by my time transcribing scenes from Joe Abercrombie's The Trouble with Peace last week.

In Story, a well-known book on screenwriting, Robert McKee asserts not only that screenwriters should outline their scenes, but that they should do everything they can to avoid writing actual dialogue until they've completed a detailed treatment of the story and characters. He maintains that focusing on building complex motivations and character subtext will create a better end-product than just, you know, writing lines. He comes across as very confident in that prescription, and I've heard more than one screenwriting professors parrot the advice. At this point, I've spent quite a bit of time trying to write stories that way, and, unfortunately, I've often felt bogged down by it.

You can find plenty of prose writers who advocate the opposite approach – telling a story by focusing on the actual language first, without necessarily fleshing out a plan first. I particularly enjoy George Saunders's perspectives on writing in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain or in his Substack newsletter, Story Club. In his writing, Saunders seems much more open to the possibility (re: inevitability) that there's more than one way to skin a story.

I still enjoy McKee's writing. He's intelligent, and he offers useful insights (particularly, I think, in his topic-specific books: Action, Dialogue, and Character). But I don't think his tactics, or Saunders's, can be universally effective for every type of writer. They may not be universally effective for even a single writer on every day that they write. I used to secretly hope there was one effective answer out there for me, if only I could find it. These days, I doubt it.

This is all a roundabout way to say I'm experimenting with how to approach telling a story, and I should feel okay about that. If I turn over enough rocks, maybe I'll find something new underneath.

Wednesday:

On Wednesday, I wrote about eight hundred words over two short sessions. I intended to do a third session, but my second short break became permanent. How? I'm not sure. For what it's worth, I did create and fill out a spreadsheet afterward, and that required a non-insignificant amount of willpower.

Friday:

How hard could that be? Famous last words, friends.

I felt irritated with myself for dropping my third session on Wednesday, so to make up for it, I very cleverly chose not to write at all on Thursday. This was some kind of brilliant psychological tactic, no doubt.

Beyond self-deprecating humor, there are a couple of ways to look at this. I'm going to try and offer myself a balanced perspective.

I'm still writing most of the time. And many people – some professional writers, even – don't achieve most of the time.

But I don't think it's enough. There's a lot of luck involved in earning opportunities in the arts, and I don't want to leave a potential career up to luck. I need to control as many variables as I possibly can, and the first and foremost of those is how much and how often I write.

It's been clear to me, ever since I was forced into "work at home" life during the 2020 lockdown, that I am not fully in control of my own brain. I probably should have understood the truth long before that, but I suppose daily life was full of enough people and noise that I never fully appreciated the phenomenon.

In the daily scope of every little thing I do, I rarely make well-thought, intentional decisions. It's more like decisions happen to me. The lizard bits and the chimp bits of my brain don't consult the little executive bit, but the executive still has to go out to the press and account for what the animals did.

It is what it is (as long as you believe in evolution). The executive just needs to wrangle the animals more efficiently. And the best way to wrangle animals might involve clear training or effective enclosures, but it's certainly not just scrambling after them whenever they make a break for it.

(I hope this metaphor hasn't scrambled away from me. You still know what I'm talking about, right?)

I decided to revisit James Clear's Atomic Habits to refresh my memory of habit formation. I feel a little ambiguous about Clear's book, mostly because I think Charles Duhigg wrote mostly the same book first with The Power of Habit, but Clear had a big online platform and phrased the information in a more productivity-focused, self-improvement style, and therefore (I think) outsold Duhigg. But I'm referencing Atomic Habits anyway, because I didn't have a copy of either on hand, and Clear made the information easier to access on his website. It's still a good book.

The "habit loop," as described by Clear, is comprised of cue, craving, response, and reward. Clear's advice for shaping a habit is to "make it obvious" (addressing the cue), "make it attractive" (addressing the craving), "make it easy" (in terms of your desired response), and "make it satisfying" (providing a reward). His advice on breaking a bad habit is to do the opposite – "make it invisible," "make it unattractive," "make it difficult," and "make it unsatisfying."

Those principles are easy enough to understand, but the real work comes with noting and assessing where and how different "cues" pop up in life. Even now, when I try to think about why and how I do or don't write in the morning, my mind hesitates, because it knows this involves effort, trial, error, and unclear answers.

The sad truth is there are cues all over my apartment. My phone is a cue, my tablet is a cue, my TV is a cue, my computer is a cue. I can make it through the simple motions, getting dressed and all that, but if I sit on the couch and think about what to do next, writing = hard, while TV = easy.

So let's get out of my apartment. Let's try getting dressed, taking care of the dog, eating a quick breakfast, and then just leaving. Getting in the car isn't so hard. I can head to a coffee shop, and the coffee can double as the reward.

I love coffee.

This might be an expensive solution, if performed on a daily basis. But I'll figure that out later. Priority number one is creating the conditions for consistent writing. I'm willing to make this next week's experiment. There's a bit of change on my schedule anyway – I'm flying to Texas to spend some time with family. Traditionally, I've had a hard time writing while travelling, so perhaps these coffee shops will give me some grounds to make progress in difficult circumstances.

We'll see how it goes.