How To Keep Your Writing Focused.

What are we doing with our lives? We see the dras­tic down­turn and then…like a farmer in tor­nado alley, we sit and wait.

This hap­pens when we’re stuck with our lives or with our writ­ing. We see our writ­ing get nox­ious and con­sti­pated and it’s in the see­ing that we can change it. Change is what makes us fix our lives, our writ­ing and our spir­i­tu­al­ity. Change makes for anger, depres­sion or just unfounded bore­dom when it comes to writing.

Start­ing a new project can make the writer proud of the new project or fear­ful. Our fear of change, the new project, can make us return to unfin­ished projects, because we know that the new­ness of a new project can make us bored. Some­times not just bored, but make our writ­ing stag­nant. Find­ing the story that inspires our writ­ing is the hard part.

Don’t let your past projects define your cur­rent projects.

Past is the past, get through the past and on to the present. Our present project is the impor­tant project. We may want to go back, but not until the cur­rent project is done. Focus is the part of writ­ing, espe­cially writ­ers with focus issues. I know a lot of writ­ers, but it’s usu­ally those that are knew to writ­ing, or that have been away from it that have the issues with focus.

Like with other things in your life, your focus should be on the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, not on the past or what you’re writ­ing next. Tak­ing your focus from the cur­rent project will lead your writ­ing to be less focused and “may” cause more rewrites in the end.

Keep your mind still and don’t move.

Our minds are con­stantly in flux. They come up with sto­ries, ideas and are mov­ing around to dif­fer­ent things every sec­ond. Keep­ing your mind still is the best thing you can do for your writing.

This still­ness doesn’t come about by sim­ply say­ing you want your mind to quiet down, it hap­pens grad­u­ally. The more you write your cur­rent project the more likely you are to fin­ish the cur­rent story. The still­ness of your mind makes it more focused and less likely to move to other ideas, that’s why fin­ished your first novel is con­sid­ered such an accom­plish­ment, your mind is still, it is focused and you keep it on task by com­plet­ing that first novel, then the sec­ond and so on.

Still­ness in thought, and being ready for that tor­rent of story ideas that comes dur­ing the day can cause dis­trac­tions, but keep a jour­nal with you at all times. Write the idea down, put it away and keep focused on your cur­rent project.

How are you keep­ing your focus

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Fol­low @Brian_B_Baker