Here’s your mantra for the week! This week’s card is from my Cards for Creative Courage oracle deck. You can get it here or here.
I mean every word I put on the card I drew for today – Keeping yourself distracted won’t get you very far – and I know many (including myself, from time to time) who could use a little slap in the face like this.
But…
Yes, there’s a but.
… I also think we owe it to ourselves and our sanity to learn how to differentiate between distractions that are acceptable and distractions that are… less acceptable.
We definitely do need to minimise distractions if we want to get to where we want to be, but we simply cannot get rid of any and all of them.
If it had been a century or more ago and if we’d happened to be male artists, then perhaps we could have, but in this day and age?
I also don’t think we should want to not have anything in our lives that distract us from our creative work. But we should want to get rid of those that unnecessarily hamper the realisation of our creative dreams and desires.
The question is where to draw the line. And that’s a hard one to answer, because you might not even be aware that you can draw a line in different spots. It becomes even harder to answer when you haven’t even allowed yourself to set any sort of boundary to begin with.
Let me give you some examples or where a line could be drawn:
There’s quite a difference between allowing your children to constantly disrupt your process and flow by entering your creative space to ask questions they could easily ask their other caretaker in the next room and allowing them to distract you from your work only when they truly need you – for example, because they are seriously injured or are upset over something they genuinely don’t feel they can discuss with anyone else in the household.
There’s allowing yourself to go online to research this one thing because you simply can’t continue your creation right now without that piece of information, and then there’s allowing yourself to end up wasting minutes – if not longer – of your time as you scroll down mindlessly (I’m looking at myself here…).
There’s allowing your partner to keep drawing your attention away from your work by constantly asking you about things that could have waited until dinner time, and allowing them to distract you when it’s absolutely necessary – they’re about to leave the house to get groceries and would very much like to know NOW whether you need anything.
What is an acceptable and not so acceptable distraction very much depends on our personal circumstances (we all have different responsibilities and obligations) and – at least, that’s my experience – the phase of creating we’re in.
I don’t have children, and neither do I live in the same country as the rest of my family. I also don’t have a romantic partner right now. As such, there are quite a few boundaries that I don’t have to set that others do.
However, I do have cats, and I also care for some strays. They get sick or need check-ups or neutering, which means I need to step away from my creative work to take them to the vet, to administer their medications, and to make sure they’re being fed so they can recover or that their wounds are healing properly.
You might not care for cats the way I do, but you might be taking care of your elderly parent(s) or a sibling or a neighbour, which comes with its own set of obligations and responsibilities. I might not live in the same country as my family, but I will be travelling to the Netherlands this summer to support my mum, who’ll be undergoing major surgery. So I’m not entirely ‘free’ of familial obligations and responsibilities, and neither do I want to be: this is the kind of ‘distraction’ I’m here for, one that I’m allowing to exist and distract me from my creative work.
Of course, you might also have one of those jobs that doesn’t always stop when you clock out because of emergency situations that you cannot and don’t want to walk away from. If you, for example, work in child protection, or as a firefighter, or as a nurse, or any of those other truly important jobs, a certain flexibility towards your job is vital.
That doesn’t mean you can’t draw any boundaries, because you can (and you probably should), but you do have to allow for certain distractions in jobs like these. It’s simply not the same as working a nine-to-five job where the worst thing that might happen is one of your co-workers calling in sick.
As I already mentioned, what kinds of distractions are OK for me and what aren’t also depends on where I am in the creative process. A minute of mindless scrolling on Instagram or Facebook might help distract my brain when I find myself stuck. While I keep my thinking brain occupied, the rest of me is often able to figure out where I should be going next.
The trick, of course, is to put down your phone or close your tab once the Aha! moment has arrived and you’re ready to continue working. Some days, this comes easily to me. On other days, I need to give my brain at least two stink eyes and a firm talking-to before it finally relents.
Back in the day, before mobile phones and social media, I used the game Solitaire or FreeCell if I was on the computer and got stuck writing or doing homework. There’s an end to those – you win or can’t continue – making it a relatively safe tool. It wasn’t always, hence the ‘relatively’, because sometimes I just kept hitting ‘Yes’ when asked whether I wanted to play again, but it did help me through numerous mental blocks.
(Yes, I did just leave to look up whether Solitaire is still on my laptop. And I played one game. Honestly!)
To help you find you find out where you would like to draw some lines, set some boundaries, I’m sharing one of the exercises from 99 Writing Prompts and Journal Exercises for Writers. If you own a copy of the third volume of 52 Weeks of Writing, you’ll find the exercise at the end of Week 39.
I know setting boundaries around our distractions is hard, but you’ll be surprised how much it can transform your creative life.
Happy creating this week, and good luck on those boundaries <3
xx Mariëlle
This exercise comes from my 99 Writing Prompts and Journal Exercises for Writers to Cultivate Courage and Kick Imposter Syndrome to the Curb.
The quote that accompanies it is from Lisa See:
Write 1,000 words a day, five days a week, before you do anything else. At the end of a week, you’ll have 20 pages—a chapter. If you do it first thing in the morning, then you won’t get distracted by all the things that tempt you not to write.
Here’s the exercise:
Boundaries are vital for any writer, but no writer is an island. We all have things we have or want to do beyond our writing.
Set your timer to ten minutes and make a list. What have you allowed to distract you from writing over the past week? Month? Year?
Once you’re done, take a good look at your list. Of all the distractions you’ve written down, which are perfectly acceptable to you? Which aren’t?
Now, write a new list only containing the distractions you’re more than willing to accommodate in your life. Pin it to the wall or keep it in another place where you get to see it regularly.
June is my birthday month, and you get 25% off everything (but my charity bundles) in my Etsy and Payhip shop until the very end of it!
What will you find here? All the PDFs of my books, some of the paperbacks (still working on it), my oracle decks, and all of my Reiki offerings, including my Reiki Hearts.
If there’s a particular paperback you would love to buy direct from me that isn’t available in these shops yet, please let me know and I’ll get it on there before June is over! Pinky swear.
Distractions can be hard to overcome, especially if a writing project makes me face uncomfortable feelings. While I was working on my historical novel The Last Priestess of Malia, I ended up going to college campus every weekday with the Offspring and sitting in the library there, where I had no wifi because I didn't have the student password. If I had to look something up, it had to be on my tiny phone screen, and I was uncomfortably aware the whole time that I wasn't doing my writing work on my computer. I got the entire novel (164,000 words worth!), including all the research, written in two semesters.