Dealing with Interruptions

When writers ask me how to be more productive I always tell them to get a writing schedule and stick to it, even though I know there will be times when they won’t be able to.  The reality is life will interrupt even the most dedicated writer.  Not even a fortified garret can protect us from life’s demands and upsets.  The good news is you can learn to dance with the interruptions.

Interruptions tend to fall into two categories: the expected and the unexpected.  The hardest to deal with is, of course, the unexpected: the illnesses, the emergencies, the general mess of life going awry.  Fortunately, these do not happen as often as the expected interruptions, and the expected ones are usually easier to deal with.   
 
Since it is just us writers here, let’s talk about our number one expected interruption: our families. (If your family tiptoes around the house, hushing each other while you write please don’t tell me unless you have a spare room I can move in to.)  Because family and close friends often fall into the category of expected interruptions it pays to have a plan.  This will help you write more and fume less.  Your plan may be to wake up before anyone else in the household to write, or to write on your lunch break at work, to write in your car, or on the subway.  It may mean forming a writing group and getting together with other like-minded writers to write in blissful silence for a set length of time.  It may mean screening your calls and only answering your phone if it is an emergency (one of my favourites).  

For me, expected interruptions come in two sizes: the small ones that I deal with as they crop up like opponents in a video game, and the large ones that I devise plans for.  A small one would be the technician arriving tomorrow to hook up my new internet (I’m writing now, in case he disrupts more of my day than I expect). Big interruptions are things like family vacations and the month of December.  

Yes, the month of December.  Every year December is a bad month for me, writing-wise.  The holidays create too many distractions and too much work for me to have enough energy left over to write well.  Once I realized this I decided December needed a plan.  This year I am going to work on a short story, instead of my novel throughout the month.  Something short will better fit into
the gaps of my chaotic days.  If all goes well I may finish a story during those dark, final days of the year, and if I don’t then the New Year will begin with a short story already underway.  It’s win-win!  In other words, it’s the perfect strategy for December.  

Since I finally faced up to the fact it is impossible for me to get any writing done on family vacations, I now leave my manuscript at home, but do take my journal and books about the craft of writing.  Reading about writing is the next best thing to actually writing and lets me feel semi-productive.  Also I try to treat the entire vacation like a writing adventure hoping to be inspired by things I wouldn’t see in my normal day to day life.

Though I dream of long, quiet hours of uninterrupted silence at my desk I rarely get them.  Life
has a way of slipping under the door and bringing chaos with her.  The trick is to be smarter, to be more creative than the interruptions.  The goal is to keep the ink flowing.  I like to imagine that my life and my writing are dance partners who occasionally step on each other’s toes but always get back in step.