Meghan Ward wrote an interesting post the other day about how she works, both as a writer and a book editor. It’s not my exact working method, but then a big part of the challenge of this business is finding what works for you, not hearing what works for others and trying to emulate it. I suspect the smart approach is to pick and choose the bits that fit.
One of Meghan’s ideas in particular really doesn’t work for me. She highly recommends a couple of pieces of software that will forcibly close your Internet connection, ensuring you focus on nothing but writing, and never Twitter of Facebook, email or anything else on the web.
Couldn’t do that for a moment. Wouldn’t do it either. Oh no.
First, there’s the practical side of things. It’s in my nature to keep checking things, thinking of things, looking up facts and spelling and pieces of language. The web is wonderful for doing that (though if it’s a serious fact I always make sure I check it from a serious source — usually a book).
I’m not saying I can’t work without that. I can and do, in planes and on trains, and it’s fine. But I wouldn’t cut them out of the equation deliberately. Part of my approach to work is discipline — and discipline means saying no yourself for me, not letting some bit of software say it for you.
There’s a bigger reason too. I really don’t mind the idea of multi-tasking. An incoming email doesn’t bother me. If I don’t want to answer it, I don’t (though as any regular correspondent will tell you I rarely sit on things). I can very easily break off from a writing session for ten or fifteen minutes and write a post like this, then go back to the book. During the writing of The Garden of Evil I was in the middle of the environmental campaign recorded in Saved, an incredibly time-consuming process that involved running a web site, writing articles, dealing with comments, all manner of stuff. That was a bit too much but I managed (though I couldn’t have done much more at that pace so it’s a good job we won when we did).
I don’t know why I’m like this. I just am. Maybe it’s because I spent years working in busy newsrooms where you were always being interrupted and often shifted from one assignment to another. I hate outside noise. I would never try to write to the sound of music. But most computer-based interruptions really don’t bother me. And sometimes they’re beneficial. They take my mind away from the story for a while so I go back refreshed, or decide to take the dog out and think over things a little more.
That’s the way I work anyway. I’ve never been keen on the idea of the writer being some solitary figure trapped in a lonely attic. A little bit of a buzz around the place quite suits me.
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I’m with you, David. I cannot work to music, even the unobtrusive classical music that many writers seem to favour. But the interruptions of the kind you mention are no problem. The proof of the pudding for you is that you can Tweet several times a day, go onto Facebook, write a blog AND produce 3-4,000 words of the novel. That’s all that matters.