Writing is the Distraction

outines for Writers is a topical blog. We generally plan monthly topics, with the three of us giving our views on the weekly subtopic. Well, when we first started talking about spending the month of April on distractions, I pushed back a little. A whole month on distractions? What would I write about? Kitty and Stephanie had lots of ideas about how they get distracted from their writing. What was my problem?

Aha! I figured out my problem last week. I don’t have distractions from my writing. Really, I don’t. At least, not in the sense that I avoid writing by cooking dinner. Or that I do laundry instead of editing. It’s the opposite. Dinner is late because I’m working on a writing class assignment. Laundry stays damp because I’m editing a scene and forget to move the clothes to the dryer.

My problem is that writing is my distraction. My job is homemaker/mom/homeschool teacher. I spend a lot of time at my “job” but my mind tends to wander, and the computer is never far away. I’m working towards adding “novelist” to my job description, and maybe hiring out more of the “homemaker” portion of my life (oh, that will be a happy day on many levels!). But until then, I gotta work with what I’ve got. And what I’ve got is:

At the back of my mind—a story. A scene. A character.

I’m distracted and let the water from the rice boil out too fast. I’m distracted and forget to give my son his spelling test. I’m distracted and keep putting off the tea party with my daughter.

So in the next few weeks I’ll be approaching the idea of distractions from a different angle. Maybe there are some of you who are in the same boat as I am.

I’m trying to figure out how to set boundaries and routines in my life so I can add writing into my day without taking too much away from the things I’m supposed to be doing.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for awhile, so it will be good to put it into words. Writing it down will force me to get more organized. I’ve got some ideas and some lists to share with you. Hopefully others can chime in with tips that have worked for them. Maybe by the end of April a bunch of us will have a new list of writer’s routines to post up by the computer.