Small Town Hermit

Do you lack discipline with your writing? Are you easily distracted from your writing — by e-mail and social media and all of the possibilities the internet has to offer and kids and pets and the thoughts in your own head? Do you have trouble getting out of your own way?

I know I do.

It’s not for a lack of ideas. I can find inspiration just about anywhere and everywhere. There was an article in, I think, The Atlantic which I read the other day and thought: “There’s a novel in here.” Sadly, I forgot to save it or bookmark it, so I have to either scroll through articles or troll my internet history (which I might have set for deletion every time I close the browser).

And that is exactly the kind of behavior I am talking about — I get an idea and then before I can really capitalize on it (not that I was going to bang out a novel in an afternoon, but I could have at least made some notes), I am off to the next thing.

Today I was distracting myself for a bit with Instagram and came across a post from NaNoWriMo recommending The Writer’s MoJo (short for Motivational Journal). It was billed as “the ultimate writer’s motivational journal and planner. It is designed with psychological mojo mind tools to help you reset your thinking and overcome writing resistance.” Plus, there was a very generous coupon. The combination was too much to resist, and I clicked.

At the moment, it only exists in a digital format with a preference for iPad, but it is a large, interactive PDF file which so far has come up just fine on my somewhat aged laptop. I haven’t tried to interact with it yet as I am still reading and learning about all of the parts and pieces.

Part of me chafes at the idea of planning and scheduling and keeping track of goals and word counts and to do lists and such, but clearly my “fly by the seat of my pants” approach isn’t getting me too far, so I figured why not. You can be detailed and granular or take a broader approach, but the key to the whole thing appears to be PAY ATTENTION. Pay attention to what you are doing, what you are not doing, what you want to do, and how it compares to what you did do. Paying attention enables you to fight the resistance, which is defined as anything (internal or external) which throws up roadblocks to your creativity.

I am going to try it out and see what happens.

If you want to check it out for yourself, go to https://www.writersmo-jo.com/.