The Distracting Business of Writing

Increasingly, I find myself wondering if there is some kind of mystical art involved in writing. For years I've been reading interviews with authors who usually express a belief that there is no magical formula for writing a book, and I guess this is pretty logical because if there were, everyone would be doing it. Yet there has to be some kind of systematic approach to it, a logical progression that leads from the first word to the final one. The trouble is that I'm a worrier, and I keep thinking that maybe my particular process is one that would be giggled at by any successful author who has been gifted with a secret knowledge that allows them to churn out novels at a rate that would impress even James Patterson's publisher.

Generally speaking, I tend to research as I go along, and usually have several Firefox windows open alongside my Word documents, which tends to slow the writing process down when I get sidetracked by interesting net tidbits that inevitably eat into my time. I suppose that most full-time writers, if they too suffer from this most mortifying of afflictions known as lack of concentration, will tolerate these momentary flights of fancy into the types of area most often frequented by researchers for Ripley's 'Believe It Or Not!' books, paranormal journalists and conspiracy theorists, because they have the luxury of not having huge slabs of their day taken up with the nail-biting excitement of analysing water samples for a living. Sadly, I don't have that luxury, which means that I'm constantly beating myself with a birch rod for allowing myself to become distracted when I should be producing another thousand words or at least rearranging those I've already committed to print into something that's coherent.

Maybe, if I ever do get over that line from having my work stuck on my word processor to having it published, I'll be able to entertain these little excursions a little more often. After all, distraction is the mother of creation...at least, that's how I've always justified it anyway. For now though I think I'd be better off sticking to what's worked pretty well for me in the past: get the bare bones of the plot down, make sure the mechanics of it are working, that there's a clear path from point A to B, that there's a continuum to the events that doesn't require a knowledge of space-time manipulation to understand, and that I do actually have a conclusion that makes sense. Then I can relax a little and enjoy the process of fleshing out and clothing the skeleton with something that resembles a book. I'm almost there...and I'm sure I'll finish today, with a little luck...and slightly fewer distractions from discussions about whether Victorian doctors used vibrators to treat hysterical women.