How To Write When You Have A Short Attention Span
I can admit it, I sometimes have trouble focusing. It’s an increasingly common problem in today’s world for myriad reasons. Here’s some methods I have used to get my mind on the task.
Limit The Influx Of Information
Personally, my love of reading tends to get in the way of my love of writing. It is important to read a lot to write a lot, but when you find yourself rereading things over and over again to the point that it’s getting in the way of other things, that can be a problem. That is my problem. I can be typing along contentedly when, suddenly, a thought occurs to me. Often, I think of some detail regarding what I am writing that I need to look up on Wikipedia or some such. Sometimes it isn’t even that. Sometimes, I just think of something completely unrelated to what I am doing that I know will eat away at me until I look it up. Truly, the internet is a mixed blessing in this way. It gives you access to massive amounts of information, but unless someone else is regulating your computer usage, you have to regulate your own consumption of that information.
In the end, that’s exactly what you have to do. If I’m going to be writing (or doing any kind of work on the computer, really), the only windows I keep open are my email and Facebook. You may find even those too distracting. Force yourself to focus by giving yourself as few possible distractions as you can. Anything you have open should be relevant to what you are doing. Worst case scenario, any non-relevant distractions should be things that will distract you for no more than a couple of minutes (“Do I have new email? No! Back to work!”). Should you need to take a break, you can always open something when you do take that break and close it when you get back to work.
Also, you should not talk to others over any sort of instant messaging service, nor should you actively engage in any other form of social media. They are all distractions.
Make The Writing More Exciting For Yourself
What sounds more fun to you? Work you are doing because you feel like you have to do it, or work you are doing because you’ve got a damn good reason to get it done? No one likes drudgery, and even something you really care about can easily become tedious and unappealing after you’ve been working on it for a long time. You can lose sight of your goals in the effort it takes to achieve them.
Remedying this problem can be as simple as keeping your long-term goals in mind, or, if you are like me, embellishing things further. Set sub-goals if that works. If there is a greater impact to your work than its mere completion, consider that! Consider how much you look forward to seeing the finished product. Offer yourself a reward for when you finish. Heck, if you’re really stubborn, deny yourself something essential until you are finished (though be warned that overusing that could have obvious negative consequences if you do it too often and without consideration for your long term health). The more important you make your work seem to yourself, the more you’ll want to focus on it.
If You Have More Than One Project, Switch Between Them
Sometimes just doing the same thing for a long time can grate at your nerves and stifle your creativity. When you spend hours looking at that same document in Microsoft Word (or whatever your choice of word processor happens to be) can bring about many work-hindering emotions, from anger to worry and every unhappy feeling alphabetically in between. So look at something else.
This suggestion is, on the surface at least, the antithesis to my first suggestion. It is, in a way, giving into the chaos, but at the same time, it is confining it. If you have more than one project going on (I know I always do), and you are experiencing writer’s block on one of them, switch to the other one for a while. Assuming you haven’t procrastinated on one to the point of a looming deadline, then there is no hurry. Maybe working on that other project will stir your creative juices in regard to the project you are stagnating on. Maybe you just need some time away from that project. Once again, keep deadlines in mind, but sometimes, you just need to look at something else.
It doesn’t even have to be a whole other project if the project on which you are working is large enough to have many different aspects to it. Bored of one topic of your essay? Start typing about another! Writing out the overarching plotline of your massive comic book idea? Start writing some character or setting profiles! If you are also doing the art for that comic book idea, move from writing to drawing! Never be afraid to shift focus if shifting focus is possible.
Listen To Music
When writing, not only do you have to deal with the above-mentioned internal (and computer-based) distractions, but more often than not, there is a whole, wide world around you seemingly out to distract you from getting any work done. Whether it’s the cacophony of construction workers or the sounds you’d rather not identify coming from your upstairs neighbours, it can often seem like your surroundings made a bet with some unseen malefactor that they could prevent you from getting any work done through sheer annoyance. Make sure they don’t win the pot on that bet.
For some reason, music helps me focus. I especially like to put on music with no lyrics. I find lyrics get in the way of the words I am trying to write, whereas music without lyrics tends to merely set a mood. I like big dramatic music because I’m a sucker for the melodramatic, but maybe you’ll prefer something more relaxing. Maybe you won’t be distracted by lyrics as me. Either way, I advise listening to music. If nothing else, it will close you off to the world surrounding you and your means of writing.
Hopefully these tips will be of help to you. I may post some more, as I found this topic to be fairly easy for me to talk about. Until then, I bid you happy writing!
My (Lack of) Religion, My Justification For It, and How I Avoid Being a Rotten Immoral Jerk
Well, I sure don’t update this blog very much, now do I? Well, maybe the days to come will see this blog actually being used. I’ve been getting rantier and rantier lately. What? Rantier isn’t a word? Umm… I’m a writer. Call it artistic license! Applied to my idiom, it gives me the “license” to make up words as I see appropriate.
Now then, to the meat…
As most of those who know me are aware, I’m not big on the whole God thing. Sure, I absolutely adore most works of fantasy and wonder and would die to live in a world where existence held that kind of inherent meaning and coherence, but when I look at the world around me, I know that it isn’t true. I’ve always seen our world as one of chaos. One of coincidence. One with no underlying meaning or order other than what we determine for ourselves. A webcomic I am particularly fond of (Captain SNES, it’s called. It’s a fan sequel to Captain N: The Game Master, except where Captain N was lame and 80s-y, Captain SNES is awesome and deconstruct-y) had its characters become aware of our world and view it as being merely a world of “stardust and chance” while viewing their’s as being the “True” world, entirely because their world made sense from a narrative perspective (as in, everything happens for a reason to them), while our’s did not. I found that particularly amusing, especially since many people I’ve met seem to try to impose that narrative perspective onto our world. I call it, appropriately enough, the “everything happens for a reason” view of things. I guess calling it the belief in fate or destiny is a little less cumbersome. Anyway, I could never see it that way. To me, that hail storm smashed your windshield because the climatic conditions were such that resulted in large hail and your car was unfortunate enough to be under it. That doesn’t necessarily mean any supernatural force hates your car or that you should buy a new car of a different brand or type. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, either, necessarily, but it’s for you to determine. No cosmic force decided anything. The winds, temperature, and moisture in the air above just happened to converge in such a way as to produce large bits of solid ice that then fell down to the earth, and your car just happened to be sitting on the stretch of earth beneath where it happened. In a work of fiction, sure, that would be happening for a reason, but life is full of details that never lead to anything, and I see no reason to attribute random events like that to any sort of overseeing guidance.
How did I arrive at this conclusion that things can just happen? Well, I guess I’ve never really had anything else pushed on me. My parents weren’t big on the whole God thing either, you see. I spent much of my childhood wondering why I never went to this church place that everyone else in school talked about and what was up with this Lord’s Prayer thing that we did in the morning, then stopped because someone out there had a problem with it (but a few of my teachers still insisted on doing it anyway). It wasn’t really a big concern, mind you, as things like stories and playing at recess and video games occupied much greater percentages of my thoughts. As I grew older and came to understand the world a little better, my views didn’t shift much. If anything, they became even less geared toward what everyone else seemed to think. I never saw why the universe couldn’t have just been made by coincidence. Sometimes, things just happen. Who’s to say that the big bang wasn’t just the result of a bunch of elements that had been drifting about and through each other for times inconceivable to our mortal minds happening to come together in such a way as to produce the effect of creating the universe as we know it? Who’s to say the Earth wasn’t a similar happy accident? After countless aeons, countless centuries of stardust aligning in all sorts of ways to all sorts of effects, this one we live in comes together in such a way that enables the formation of the world we live on. It’s hard to say how many false starts might have happened because we weren’t there for it, and our knowledge of how the universe works isn’t yet such that we can figure it out.
To summarize, I never felt the urge to take a leap of faith on how the universe worked because it was never forced on me, and I never saw why it couldn’t all have happened to be a coincidence. It never bothered me, because to me, the most important part isn’t how we got here (though it doesn’t hurt to know such information), it’s the fact that we’re here, and what we do while we’re here.
In terms of guidance in our own lives, assuming some kind of benevolent deity was watching over me never really clicked either. Again, I found it an interesting notion, but I’d just seen too many holes in the idea. As I grew up, I would come to see some pretty strong arguments against the idea of a divine being watching over me, the strongest one being the death of my father a few years ago. See, my dad was never religious, like I said, but he still was basically the model father. He was kind and gentle, he was supportive, he was fair, and he was well-liked by his community and did so much for it, and that’s just the start of the awesome things about dad. So, in his early 50s, he is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease, and he spends the next eight years slowly dying in one of the worst ways possible, all the while being a tremendous and traumatizing burden on his loved ones. Now, in his youth, dad played rugby, and when I say played, I mean there are not enough ways I could embellish the word “played” to justly emphasize the passion with which he played that sport, and most others. To put it succinctly, he more than once found himself unconscious, sometimes more than once within the same game. He also drank a lot in his youth, and again, I could capitalize, embolden, italicize, strike-thru, color red, and increase the text size of the words “a lot” and still not adequately capture the spirit with which and terrifying amounts that he drank. Sad as I am to admit it, there are reasons, from a biological perspective, for him to have died the way he did. That’s not what I am questioning. Some people live as he did, though, and possibly even worse, and do not have the long-term complications that he did. For all of his “sins” of youth, dad had grown into a mature, responsible, kind and loving person, but he still died horribly.
So, if there’s a God, why did this happen? Why were his sins judged so heavily against him becoming nearly perfect in the eyes of a moral, loving God? Is believing in Him/Her/It really such a linchpin thing? If so, why? And can a God that takes such a heavy stance on such a seemingly minor “flaw” like not being of correct spiritual orientation really be called moral by the standards He/She/It has supposedly set? I’m pretty sure at least some religions do have a “God’s above his own rules” kind of stance, but that doesn’t fly with me. If He/She/It doesn’t play by His/Her/Its own rules, why should we? Call me stubborn, heathen, or outright evil if you will, but I just need more justification than a book that was written ages ago based on stories told even further ages ago telling me to do it because a perfect creator being that I have to believe in with all my heart without satisfactory evidence to justify its existence tells me that it’s what I have to do, but it doesn’t have to itself because its the freaking creator and that is satisfactory justification because it is.
All this said, I still don’t label myself an Atheist. I lean heavily in that direction, I admit, but I still say I’m an Agnostic. Did you see that South Park episode the other day about the ridiculously unlikely hardcore agnostic family? If not, I wholeheartedly recommend it. It’s hilarious. Anyway, why do I still call myself an agnostic, despite having so many counterarguments against the likelihood of there being an all-knowing, all-loving creator being, both logical and personal? Well, it’s pretty simple…
I could be wrong.
The simple fact of the matter is that negatives are very difficult to prove, and proving the negative of the divine overseer is almost certainly beyond our means. It is literally impossible to say for sure that there isn’t a God, simply because we lack the means to go where God must be and find that there irrefutably isn’t God there. We may never have that capability.
I cannot say for sure that there wasn’t some sort of divine intervention that led to the big bang happening (nor can I truly say the big bang happened, but empirically gathered data certainly rings affirmative) because I wasn’t there and I lack the capacity to make that judgment call. Maybe God just doesn’t like being direct and obvious about His/Her/Its actions and actuality for whatever reason. Whatever the reason is doesn’t really matter, because I, being a lowly mortal, lacking the capacity to pinpoint divine intervention, cannot perceive it, and may be outright unable to comprehend it. I’m pretty sure Descartes had some views about reality that were along these lines. He thought there was a God, but widespread, open challenge to the idea of God is a pretty recent thing (or at least doing so and not having unpleasant things happen to you is), so it is hard to say what he’d think if he were alive today.
In terms of morality, maybe I’ve got the completely wrong idea about my dad’s death. Maybe it was brought on by my inability to perceive with certainty that, upon his death, dad went to heaven or became one with God or whatever eternal happiness might happen beyond our comprehension. Maybe his suffering for the sins of his youth and his non-belief happened on earth so he could ascend into heaven and achieve the reward for his later years. And really, if I dare say so, his decline could have gone a lot worse. He had a loving, supportive family with him the whole time. His last days were spent with his favourite people in the world by his side, reassuring him that they loved him and that he did well with this whole living thing. From the perspective of someone with a little more faith in the divine, that’s probably not so bad a way to go. Beats dying alone, knowing full well that you’ve wasted your life, at any rate. I don’t know what the grand cosmic truth is. I can’t know. I may never know. It is, therefore, entirely possible that my above reasoning for finding the existence of a loving God could be entirely incorrect. I just took it apart, after all, and even if it seems logical to me, I can absolutely see how someone else could reason things out differently.
It could well be there is a divine will that is simply too complex and too far over my head for me to understand.
So, for the above reasons and many others, I will never fault a person for having spirituality. I may not be much into it, but I can understand how it could be. If it gives you some sense of meaning in this difficult world, then power to you. If you find it enriching, then don’t let the previous nay-saying get you down. Spirituality and thoughts of the world beyond our perceptions have inspired far more great things than terrible things, certainly not the least being science itself. I probably don’t know anything for sure that could disprove your view of the world. If it is how you derive your morals… well, I guess it’s good to get them from somewhere, but I do hope you don’t do things solely because “God commands it,” because that seems like the opposite mode of reasoning to what a God that wants us to be nice to each other would want us to be nice to each other for.
I hear it often enough that atheists and agnostics are somehow inherently less moral than those who believe in the divine because they won’t listen to the guidance of God or some such. While it’s inevitable that some non-believers are going to be jerks, I am sure it is no more prevalent a phenomenon than there being jerks who subscribe to any other belief system. The simple fact of the matter is that, wherever the concepts of good and bad behaviour came from, it is just common sense to strive toward the former. We all have to live on this planet together, so there inherently must be standards of behaviour that we must follow to survive together. Some people are better than others at acting according to these standards, and there are far more complex and far more immediate reasons to obey them than “God says so”, like “I need to act in accordance with the rules, or I will be punished”, and “I want other people to like me so I can socialize and not feeling crushingly lonely; also, maybe sex”, and many other reasons. The people who are the biggest problem are not the people who don’t believe in the same particular version of the supernatural as you do, they are the people who do not follow these standards of morals. They may believe in them, but, wittingly or not, they tend to stray from doing what’s right. Now, I’m not even saying that morals are hard and fast things that should never be challenged, but I think most religions, and most logic in terms of doing the right thing, can boil things down to a simple few criteria: “How do my actions affect me? How do my actions affect the people around me? How do my actions affect the world as a whole?”
The priority one gives each of these is also a significant factor. Our culture seems to view the importance of these questions as being in the order I just gave them, but the truth of the matter is that their importance is highly variable depending on context, and most of the time should slant the other way.
I’m not saying you should selflessly fling yourself off a bridge for the sake of solving the world’s overpopulation problem, but keep in mind that there are a lot of us on this planet, and, to give one example amongst a near-infinite number, just because you are inconvenienced to have to look for a garbage can to throw your chocolate bar wrapper into doesn’t mean you should feel justified in just throwing it to the ground. You may just be contributing one small chocolate bar wrapper to the overall mass of litter in the world, but you are still contributing to the prevalent attitude that treating the world as a big garbage can is all right. Odds are pretty good that someone else will see the wrapper on the floor, if not you in the act of littering, and, consciously or not, become slightly more inclined toward it. In the long term, this trend results in piles upon piles of misplaced scraps, all over the world, as the millions of infinitesimal wrongs against the planet as a whole add up to measurable damage. Now, I’m not saying the fact that there’s a lot of litter in the world rests entirely on the fact that one time you let a few chips fall out of your bag and didn’t pick them up, but it is the product of an attitude that is counterproductive to humanity as a whole, and that the way to stop this counterproductive attitude is for you and everyone else to decide to do better. God willing it to be so is possible, but not within our capacity to ascertain, and in the end, whether or not He/She/It was guiding your hand to clean up your trash is, to me at least, less important than the fact that you did it. It’s the right thing to do, and contributes to creating an attitude of doing the right, unselfish thing to do. Someday, maybe humanity will fall upon this way of thinking naturally, but in the here and now, we must struggle uphill to make it so, against ourselves and the dominant attitude of selfishness.
I may not have a great deal of knowledge about the underpinnings of the universe, but I know that life is a wondrous thing, and I hope we, the ones at the top of the food chain, can learn to keep the world together. It’s almost certainly been said before, but whether or not you believe in an afterlife, I see no reason to be a jerk in this one.
Final Blasphemy Deconstruction/Demolition: Act 1, now available for your reading pleasure…
Well, I suppose I haven’t really done anything spectacular with this blog yet, but I may as well point you toward the new chapter of my longest-running work, Final Blasphemy.
Check it out here: http://www.drunkduck.com/Final_Blasphemy/?p=684528
Jeremy’s Got A Blog…
Well, people have told me I should write one of these blog things that are becoming so popular, so, here we are…
Truth to tell, I used to have an old LiveJournal one, back in the day, but I never did anything useful with it, so we’ll just pretend it never existed…
If I’ve figured out the way these WordPress folk work things, there should be links to both of my webcomics on the side of the page. View them at your leisure. Anything pertaining to my webcomics that doesn’t directly pertain to new ones being added will be hosted here, including previews and whatnot for the upcoming Final Blasphemy: Deconstruction/Demolition… plus any announcements about new projects…
Otherwise, I’m sure I’ll figure out other things to blog about…
We’ll see how it goes…
