Snip and type.

There’s one piece of advice I hear everywhere when it comes to writing: get rid of all your distractions.

Today was Evan’s surgery for his hernia. Poor kid has had one for 13 months and he never said a word. The surgeon thinks he’s great, which he is, but was astounded at how big the hernia actually was. When he came out (late), he had a big smile and held his hands up to calm Kathi and I.

“He’s fine, he’s fine. The hernia was HUGE, but it couldn’t have gone better. I’ve made him marketable again.”

So as a dad, I’m glad my 17 year old, 245lb baby boy will be ok now.

While we were at the hospital for a good chunk of the day, however, Kathi felt we could do more work on the Wanted Hero story. To work at home I have to have ear plugs in all the time not to be distracted, let alone in a hospital with a TV, nurses in and out, conversations, cell phones, hospital pages, beeping machines and just general traffic. My mind simply couldn’t wrap around the work.

Yet Kathi insisted and said some work done was better than no work done.

Let me give you my personal opinion on that…

No.

When you are distracted, you are more likely to make mistakes you would not normally make when it’s silent, or you have a controlled environment that allows you to get ‘into the mood’. That means second guessing yourself and having to eventually go back and make the corrections, deletions and in my case…just make sense of what you threw up on the pages.

Don’t do it. Separate your personal and writing life if you can. If you find an urge to write in a location where you can’t have that peace of mind, I would suggest you do what I did today: create notes and ideas for your story. I took my creation books and refined ideas and pondered simple aspects that were fed by a wandering mind. I recorded sparks to create sparks later on.

Always give yourself room to create, but make sure you set aside the dedicated time for writing and GUARD IT AS SACRED TIME!

-Jaime Buckley