Cory Doctorow on ‘Writing in the Age of Distraction’

Over at Locus online an interesting article by Cory Doctorow (they’re always interesting, actually) deals with writing in the internet age. You know how it is — never before has it been easier to write copy with our ultra-portable laptops, spellcheckers, online encyclopedias, and laser printers stuffed with cheap paper, yet matching pace with these advances is our ability to distract ourselves from the work at hand. I know I’ve wrestled with this myself, and even bought myself a piece of kit, the Alphasmart Neo, as a help around some of my distractions. Doctorow offers some good advice, some of which I very familiar with and can endorse from experience, and some of which is new to me.

Probably the two biggest ways to ensure steady production is to create an unflagging, but manageable, work schedule and stick to it even when you can write more, and to leave the day’s work unfinished. Combined, these two rules ensure your mind is propelled forward toward the next day’s writing and, that when you sit down the following day to pick up in the middle of a sentence or scene, you have a much easier time getting started.

Then Doctorow suggests we don’t research as we write, a sin I’m guilty of. While sometimes I have no problems googling a quick reference for a story I’m writing and then jumping back into the flow of things, other times I’ve fallen into what Doctorow warns against: “an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day’s idyll through the web.” The times I have successfully and by necessity pulled this off were for very small projects in which my enthusiasm far exceeded my knowledge, and I more-or-less researched and wrote simultaneously. But I can’t imagine that approach working on anything other than a very short story. Doctorow shares a tip used by journalists, inserting ‘TK’ into the the text where you are unsure of the content, as it’s easy to pick up with a search later ( the letters TK only rarely appearing next to each other in English words). I use brackets for the same reason, as they stick out and don’t get used much for anything else.

He talks too of the worst distractors on our computers, the IM, chat, and RSS feeds that give us up to-the-minute distractions. But the one tip he gave that really intrigued me, as I’ve been thinking the same thing, is to lose the fancy word processing software in favor of simpler programs. He recommends text editors, but I’m not sure I want to go that far — especially as I’d have to go through the process of copying the text out of them and into whatever spell-checking and .rtf file generating software I’d use to prepare the manuscript. I’d love to find some middle ground, something with the stark simplicity of a textpad (or, preferably, dark room) and some of the functionality of a word processor. This demands further experimentation on my part, but I’m open to any recommendations.