Guest Blogger
Antony Johnston
Dodging Distraction.
Antony Johnston is the New York Times bestselling author and creator of Atomic Blonde. He also writes both the Dog Sitter Detective mysteries and the Brigitte Sharp thrillers. A former vice chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, for more than twenty years he’s written books, graphic novels, non-fiction, videogames, and screenplays. Much of it has been done with a snoozing hound curled up in his study.Antony says, ‘In the past I’ve written Marvel superhero comics, chart-topping horror videogames, and cyber-spy thriller novels. But currently I’m focused on my new cosy crime series, The Dog Sitter Detective, starring a retired actress who takes up dog sitting and keeps stumbling across murders…! If you want to know how I fit all this in, I also wrote a productivity guide for authors called The Organised Writer.’
Antony’s Tip:
We all struggle with distraction while writing. While some can resist the internet’s siren call for a few hours, many of us find that once we’ve gone online, it’s difficult to get back into focusing on our work. Our heads fill up thinking about emails, tweets, and Facebook posts we’ve seen, what we think about them and how we’re going to reply.
If that sounds like you, my recommendation is simple: don’t go online until you’ve finished writing for the day.
Even if that means you don’t check your email until very late, or you don’t look at Twitter until the evening, it’s worth it. Humans are social, conversational creatures – which means that once we’ve read something that expects a reply, we often can’t settle down until we’ve got it out of our system.
So many writers feel they should ‘deal with their email’ before writing, which sounds fine in theory, but in practice can be a disaster. It’s all too easy to think, ‘I’ll just send this reply first, and then I’ll start writing’… only to look up several hours later and realise you still haven’t cleared out your inbox, but now you’ve run out of time and it’s too late in the day to get any real work done.
Instead, try this. Wake up; deal with family/life obligations; then begin to write with a ‘clean mind’, free of intrusive mental pollution from the real world.
It’s easier said than done, I know. It takes willpower, and discipline. But I’ve been working this way for more than fifteen years, and I can tell you it definitely works. I wrote The Dog Sitter Detective during the first Covid lockdown, which was a time when I really didn’t feel like writing anything at all. But using the ‘clean mind’ method I was able to get the first novel in a brand new series finished in just a few months.
So why not give it a try?
We all struggle with distraction while writing. While some can resist the internet’s siren call for a few hours, many of us find that once we’ve gone online, it’s difficult to get back into focusing on our work. Our heads fill up thinking about emails, tweets, and Facebook posts we’ve seen, what we think about them and how we’re going to reply.
If that sounds like you, my recommendation is simple: don’t go online until you’ve finished writing for the day.
Even if that means you don’t check your email until very late, or you don’t look at Twitter until the evening, it’s worth it. Humans are social, conversational creatures – which means that once we’ve read something that expects a reply, we often can’t settle down until we’ve got it out of our system.
So many writers feel they should ‘deal with their email’ before writing, which sounds fine in theory, but in practice can be a disaster. It’s all too easy to think, ‘I’ll just send this reply first, and then I’ll start writing’… only to look up several hours later and realise you still haven’t cleared out your inbox, but now you’ve run out of time and it’s too late in the day to get any real work done.
Instead, try this. Wake up; deal with family/life obligations; then begin to write with a ‘clean mind’, free of intrusive mental pollution from the real world.
It’s easier said than done, I know. It takes willpower, and discipline. But I’ve been working this way for more than fifteen years, and I can tell you it definitely works. I wrote The Dog Sitter Detective during the first Covid lockdown, which was a time when I really didn’t feel like writing anything at all. But using the ‘clean mind’ method I was able to get the first novel in a brand new series finished in just a few months.
So why not give it a try?
The Dog Sitter Detective is out now. If you want to learn more about Antony’s process, check out his author’s productivity guide The Organised Writer.The Dog Sitter Detective: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0749029943/
The Organised Writer: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1472977181/
The Organised Writer: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1472977181/
You can learn more about The Dogsitter Detective at https://dogsitterdetective.com. Or follow him on social media, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
