March 22, 2010

If you’re traveling west, you’ll end up in California. Go East, and you might land in New York instead. The direction you choose determines your destination. 

But what makes you choose one direction over the other? For most people, it’s whatever grabs your attention. If warm beaches and surfing snag your attention, you’re more likely to head west than east. As your attention goes, so goes your life.

What does that mean for your writing life? It means that when distractions come along–and they will–these distractions can snag your attention, pull you off course and change your direction if you’re not careful.

The Formula

Whatever grabs your attention determines the direction you head. And the direction you head determines where you end up. This is true for everyone. For every area of your life, the formula is the same:

               Attention –> Direction –> Destination

How can you make this “principle of the path” work for you instead of against you in your writing life?

This? Or This?

You can remember that we have choices. We don’t have to be ruled by the things that initially grab our attention. (Attention-grabbers include pop-up ads whenyou surf the web, commercials for food on TV, new cars as you drive by a car lot, a fight with your teenager, and being snapped at by your boss.) We can choose to give our attention to these things. Or we can remove or disentangle our attention from something and deliberately place it somewhere else.

According to Andy Stanley in The Principle of the Path, “Whereas emotion fuels the things that grab our attention, intentionality fuels our decision to give certain things our attention.” In other words, distractions excite our emotions and snag us almost against our will, but we can intentionally choose to give our attention to something else, like a goal.

Death to Distractions

This is good news for writers! We all need a strategy for dealing with things that distract us from our writing goals. Distractions do more than rob us of our writing time that day or that week. They can set us on a path that will lead us to a destination we don’t want.

You don’t think so? Does it sound melodramatic? Well, look back on your life. Are there areas you now wish you’d given more attention to? Maybe you wish you’d paid more attention to your health or your marriage or the way your handle money. Things might be better for you now if you’d given more  attention to those areas then.

Fork in the Road

The same thing is true of your writing career. If you are consistently turning away from unwanted distractions and choosing instead to give your attention to writing and writing-related activities (reading, studying, networking with other writers), you’re heading in a good direction. You will end up at a different destination five, ten or fifteen years from now.

Each time a distraction tempts you to veer away from your writing, you’re at a fork in the road. You will choose one path or the other. I hope you choose the writing path!

6 Comments »

1. 

   GREAT post! It’s like we’ve talked about this or something. I can find myself easily distracted, sometimes, by the very things you mentioned in your post. I’m definitely working at making better choices and choosing the path less traveled to get to my writing goals.

   Comment by Susanne Drazic — March 22, 2010 @ 8:39 am

2. 

   Susanne, once I reframed distractions as that “fork in the road” concept, it made a lot of difference to me in being able to push past it and keep my attention focused on the writing. I remind myself that I’m not just STOPPING work for a while, but am in fact going down a path now that is going to lead to disappointment if I don’t make a course correction ASAP.

   Comment by Kristi Holl — March 23, 2010 @ 4:52 am

3. 

   I found your blog for the first time yesterday. I enjoyed what I’ve read so far. I passed the aptitude test that the Institute of Children’s Literature sent me, but how do I know if I have any children’s stories in me? A picture book is definitely out of the question at this point.

   Comment by Marilyn Goertzen — March 23, 2010 @ 9:56 am

4. 

   Thanks, Kristi! It’s good to know this. I get distracted by most anything and must keep my goals in sight. Thanks for the helpful reminder!

   Comment by Jennifer Major — March 23, 2010 @ 12:55 pm

5. 

   Marilyn, congratulations for passing the test! I remember how excited I was when that happened for me. I never wrote a picture book either, so I understand your comment. I guess you won’t know the answer to your question until you get into the course and try it–that’s really the only way any of us knew actually. Discovery was half the fun! Good luck!

   Comment by Kristi Holl — March 24, 2010 @ 8:06 am

6. 

   Jennifer, we all deal with multiple distractions these days, so don’t feel bad that it’s a struggle. While there are many good things about the technical age we live it, it has also multiplied the distractions about 100X. When I started writing, I had no Internet for fifteen years, lived on a farm, and had no distractions other than my children. These days writers really have to be proactive to turn off phones, ignore email and Blackberries and Facebook and YouTube, ignore movies on a zillion channels, etc. It can be done, but it has to be a very definite choice now!

   Comment by Kristi Holl — March 24, 2010 @ 8:11 am

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website