The Zone (or How to Leverage Writing with Attention Problems)

Me, in real life.

I have never been the most focused person in the universe. Whenever I'm on my laptop, I have about fifteen tabs open, and I bounce back and forth between them. Whenever I'm having a conversation with an acquaintance, my mind keeps drifting towards my novel, or the Toronto Blue Jays, or an undeniably cool acorn that I saw fifteen minutes ago, or why the stars in the sky look like Jennifer Grey. I would give you a medical diagnosis and the long tale of how I finally came to terms with it but, truth be told, I've never gotten my attention issues checked out. I've batted around labels like "ADD" and "classic gifted" (my mother's very polite choice) and "just zoned out," but none have really stuck, and no amount of labelling changes the fact that I just flat out suck at paying attention to things for longer than about, oh, fifteen seconds.

This is, not surprisingly, something that comes in conflict with my writing. I find my novels work out best when I can settle into a writing environment and not escape for two or three hours; it lets me get into the flow of my story, my world and my characters and get it all out. This does not happen nearly as much as I'd like. What generally happens is I sit down, open my laptop, check out ten AskReddit threads, write 200 words, watch five YouTube videos, write 300 words, chat with some friends, write 100 words, watch an episode of Survivor or Chopped or whatever tickles my fancy, write 50 words, and go to work. This is miles away from my productive ideal, and when I succumb to my brain's impulse to bounce around every little thing and not stick to my zone, I get choppy and borderline incoherent writing. Heck, before I started writing this post, I read three articles, which led to a full album on YouTube and a dalliance on Twitter.

Luckily for me, I am not defenseless against my brain. I've got a few things that I can do to help myself and stay on target. I'm not going to pretend they come with a 100% effectiveness guarantee, but they do come with a higher success rate than twiddling my thumbs and expecting the literary goddesses to bless me with laser-sharp, fighter pilot-esque focus. I'm not ShamWow Guy here.

HOW COULD ANYONE NOT WIN WITH THIS METHOD?????

• Block out all the distractions. I'm not talking about a meditative breathing exercise wherein you only focus on your writing and use your inner forces to let the surrounding chaos drip away like a melting candle far off in the horizon. I'm talking far more literally here. Block your favourite websites, block your internet, and block your friends. On my Mac, I use a wonderful program called SelfControl, which allows you to blacklist a bunch of websites for a time span ranging from 15 minutes to 24 hours. Once you set your timer, those websites cannot be accessed, even if you delete the program. My current blacklist includes about 15 websites, and it expands every time I sit down to write and find a new tangent.
  
  The downside: if I had a nickel for every time I missed an invitation to a social gathering because of my SelfControl timer...
  
• Get comfortable, but not too comfortable. I cover a lot of this in my post on where to write, but I'll reiterate: if you find a good writing location, hold onto it until it goes blue from the amount of pressure you're putting on its windpipe.
  
  A corollary to this one...
  
• Music helps. Your music doesn't have to reflect the mood of the story, but it doesn't hurt. More important to me is that good music occupies one of my senses. If my headphones are in, my ears aren't searching for something around my laptop to distract me with. My favourite bands generally depend on the story I'm writing. For my current work in progress, I'm finding that Infected Mushroom, an Israeli psytrance band, is getting me in the right frame of mind.
  

  

  It doesn't hurt that Infected Mushroom has the most amazing album covers.

• Start with small goals and grow big. Yesterday, I wanted to complete one of Mónica Bustamante Wagner's voice development exercises from the maddening perspective of Donald Trump. One of my writing buddies was working on another piece for a friend. She hit 967 words. I thought 967 words was reasonable, so I vowed to match her. Those 967 turned into a goal of 1500, which turned into a goal of 2500, which turned into my final word count of just over 3300. By giving myself things that were easy to reach, I could shut off that feeling of discouragement and plug forward into meeting them. I tricked my brain into focusing for 15-30 minute chunks, which stack on top of each other into a 2-3 hour chunkpocalypse. I'm not the fastest writer in the first place (I've got bad fine motor skills too!) so this helps stop things from seeming too insurmountable.
  
  Adding onto this...
  
• Make your goals public. If I want to get 500 words before I go to bed, I announce it in my Skype writing group. If I want to write for 15 straight minutes, I tell my friend. That way, if I don't do it right away, or wander over to Facebook, I have my friends to hold me to my stated goals. More recently, I've decided to start tweeting out my daily word count, inspired by fellow writers Dylann Crush (give her a follow) and Drew Magary (a Deadspin/GQ writer who has tweeted his weight out daily before). Accountability, whether real or imagined, overrides the "nah, you totally need to check out the pattern on this tissue box" part of my brain. And, for anyone checking this post out: my goal is to write at least 2,000 words every day. If I do not meet that goal, you are welcome to ask me what the fuck happened.
  
  This all leads to the last thing that undeniably keeps me on track.
  
• If you magically, somehow, some way find The Zone, turn into a sea urchin and protect that beautiful slice of heaven for however long you can. I can become irrationally prickly if people try to intrude on me while my writing was working. If someone tries to open up a dialogue with me while I'm swimming in my main character's voice, I will reject them faster than Dikembe Mutombo in his prime (sports reference!) and keep my area clear. I have confused and irritated friends and family with my vehemence. Is it the best social move for me? Probably not. Does it ensure that I don't lose my precious moments of crystal clear focus, the next of which may not come along for 48 hours? Hell yes. And when you're writing and working, preserving that time is paramount...especially if you have the attention skills of a squirrel on crystal meth, and your fingers move at a speed that would make only a sloth jealous.

I'm not going to pretend my methods work all the time for everyone. Heck, I'm not going to even pretend that they work all the time for me. I planned on finishing this post before I went to work. Now, I'm heading home from work on the Taipei MRT, and I'm still banging out the last few sentences. When you're sparring with your own attention span, you can't just nuke it and say that you've won the war. But when you have issues focusing, you need to do all you can to throw yourself out of "space brain" and into "writing brain," and hope that today isn't the day that a really spectacularly coiffed Golden Retriever walks into your cafe. 

Hahahaha, that dog looks like a tiger! Wait, was I writing something?

Pitch Wars Diary Day 2: Tweet Tweet

The Annapurna Circuit. Gorgeous, enlivening, intimidating.

Right now, I am en route to Michigan to meet up with my sherpa in order to proceed down the Pitch Wars Circuit and stick our pickaxes in the ice. We envision ourselves doing a whole lot of this:

Kicking ass, taking names.

But we'll probably wind up doing more of this:

OMG THAT TWEET SOUNDS A TINY TINY BIT LIKE MY QUERY

After acquiring the snacks, the gear, and the motivation, the next step on the journey is research. In order to complete your trek up Mount Pitchwars, or any other mountain, you need to be aware of your surroundings. You need to be acclimatized to the conditions that forge a successful writer-champion. Or, to put it in another way, you need to be acclimatized to Twitter.

I used to tweet a lot (say, four years ago or so). They were pretty stupid and unproductive, as most teenaged tweets manage to be. I offered the same thoughts about hockey that everybody else had, expected a reply from celebrities that never came, and generally became consumed by everything. After I moved to Taiwan, my tweeting died down almost completely. You can see monthlong gaps between my tweets, followed by short bursts, whenever I saw a movie and just had to share all of my hot takes. It wasn't that I fell out of love with Twitter. I just felt as if I ran out of things to say. I was teaching every day, and really, constant streams of "Well, I taught English today" aren't particularly interesting to the average user. I was barking nonsense into the void. There wasn't really much if any community for me to capitalize on.

Something like this.

And then Pitch Wars rolled around, and absolutely everything changed. I started tweeting more because it felt like the thing everyone was doing. I finally had a manuscript that I felt confident enough in to try and make the leap from amateur to professional. So I decided to post a few tweets here and there, poking my toes back into the cool lake of Twitter. And then I ripped off all of my clothes and did a cannonball. I basically spend every waking second on Tweetdeck, with one eye on the #PitchWars hashtag, another on my notifications, bouncing around every feed to try and find every drop of new information. Through it all, I'm tweeting way more than I did even during my tweeting heyday. I need to draw inspiration from Aragog; if I had oodles of eyes and oodles of legs, I'd be the Twitter champion.

Everyone says every day how awesome the Pitch Wars community is, but I feel the need to reiterate it, if only for my own records. The Pitch Wars community is absolutely amazing because there's not a bad seed in the bunch. Sports Twitter is a riotous place, but very very flammable. If you get involved in a dispute, you're going to be ensnared for hours defending yourself and everything you stand for, because there's always a chance that you'll get pile-driven. It made me more hesitant to tweet; you never know when something you say will be taken the wrong way. Pitch Wars, however, is such a beacon of positivity. I don't really see it as a competition anymore. I see it as a group of people who all want the same thing, and believe that we all can get it without stepping on each other. I've found myself so passionate about books that I've never read, simply because they share the Pitch Wars hashtag.

We're a big wacky family.

That's the beauty of Twitter. It brings a bunch of people together and lets us make each other better. And that's why I've fallen full force into it: once again, Twitter has become a place where I feel at home. I finally have something to say again, and the fact that there are people who seem eager to hear it makes it all the much better.

Pitch Wars Diaries Day 0: Lettin' Go Is Hard To Do

I submitted my Pitch Wars manuscript today.

Actually, submitted is probably the wrong word. Saying I submitted my manuscript would be inaccurate. That implies that I opened the page on Brenda Drake's site, attached my documents, picked out my mentors, and pressed submit. That was not the case. First, I spent a solid 48 hours in a cocoon of my own anxiety. I then needled every single one of my critique partners (who have awe-inspiring patience) with a copy of my first chapter, begging them to spot all the flaws. When they didn't spot any flaws, I insisted they were mistaken, and asked them to make absolutely sure that everything was perfect. Following this, I nearly vomited up my sushi dinner. I went to bed, and woke up in an equal panic. I begged strangers to double check my query, and consequently started sobbing in my bed. Only after I listened to "Hard Rock Hallelujah" on full volume a solid 20 times was I able to summon the courage to submit.

My rough mental state at the moment.

This was about two hundred times harder than I expected it to be. I thought I was ready to submit. I wasn't. Every time I came close to entering, my heart would freeze, my hands would clam up, and everything about me screamed "NO." I've had a hate-hate relationship with my anxiety since I was old enough to spell "anxiety," and it decided that now was the time to hop onto my desk, bring me a cup of arsenic-laced coffee, and not leave until I conceded all possibility of forward momentum to it. I like to call these the panic worms. They get into you, and wriggle into places where you think they can't go.

Except with fewer tusks.

This is the first time I've shown my writing to strangers, ever. I picked out my mentors and had a few conversations on Twitter, but they're not people who I've known for years. I smother my writing, because I feel like, if I show it to people, they'll confirm what my panic worms are telling me. If my writing is perfect, I'll be invulnerable, but what if it isn't perfect? What if they don't like my characters' names? What if they think I over-describe everything? What if they hate it, or worse, it just doesn't inspire any reaction? I always think that this time, I'll be able to be confident in my own writing, and it just never happens. Even when people say that they like my writing, I don't believe them. I think there must be something they're missing. And the worst part is that I need to fight it every step of the way. No matter how often I tell myself that my writing is good and worth sharing, the what ifs plague me. I tell them to shut up, and they, like my students, decide to react by getting even louder. That's what they were doing today.

And then I sent it in. And the green-lettered confirmation message came up. And the what ifs, and the panic worms, and the self-doubt, all vanished. And now I feel like this.

Pretty much this giddy. I genuinely can't believe I managed to send it off.

To me, Pitch Wars (and publishing as a whole) is like extreme mountaineering. A typical analogy of this form would go that writing a story is like climbing a mountain, and when you reach the summit and finish, you can look down and look at all the progress you've made. To me, the task of climbing begins months, even years, before you even set foot on a trail. You have to buy the equipment. You have to book time off work. You have to do some physical training (mild for some people, likely extreme for me). But, most importantly, you have to convince yourself that you are able to climb a mountain. It's the first step, and it's the most important one. You need to look at those giant hunks of rock and ice littered with corpses and flags, and tell yourself that you, yes you, can be one of the people insane and driven enough to make it to the absolute top. You need to convince yourself that this mountain was set out for you to conquer.

Right now, I'm at base camp. My boots are strapped on. I have a more experienced sherpa by my side (Bryanne Green, who is subbing to YA and basically saved my query from being a horrible, illegible mess...you should check out her site). And I've got my eyes turned to the sky, and all I can see before me is Everest, or Kilimanjaro, or Alishan, or McKinley. And I'm struck with wonder by every crevasse, every trail, every tree. By allowing my story to fly, I get to take in this view, full of the knowledge that somehow, some way, I'm going to make it to the top. The panic worms are locked in a jar at home, right next to the jar of Szechuan peppercorns. This is my story, and hopefully, it will be my mountain. But even if I don't get to the top, man, what a view.

2015 #PitchWars Mentee Bio: Ethan Calof

My method of spreading messages.

A NOTE FROM AN URBAN SCAVENGER: This scroll was found tacked the side of a slightly withered, shabby red tree trunk a few miles outside of the City-State of Pitchwarsia. Nobody knows why it was tacked on the side of any tree, much less this tree. There is a corkboard in the centre of Pitchwarsia where rangers and rogues alike post their curricula vitae for larger parties and guilds to peruse. This tree was in the middle of a sleepy residential neighbourhood. The best possible explanation for this? Every day, the authors who live in this area come out and stare at the tree for precisely seven and a half minutes at a time. I'm not sure whether they do it out of deep contemplation on the nature of the universe, boredom, or to offset the sinking realization that there isn't enough coffee in the world. It's not my role to judge. I can only hope that the poor, deluded soul who decided to post on this tree found what he was looking for.

Friends, fellow Pitchwarsians, lend me your ears!

No, not those ears.

I, Ethan Calof, come to tell the tale of...myself. If an enlightened wordsmith decides to accept me into their party as a bard, I can provide fountains of ink, reams of paper, and stories for every waking hour. I also bring endless Harry Potter references, Arrested Development chicken dances, Avatar: The Last Airbender gifs, Mel Brooks impersonations, and Breaking Bad freakouts.

I began writing when I was about seven years old, inspired by Harry Potter and the rest of my family's library. I wrote about a child prince named Redhilltops who surfed down a rainbow with his talking monkey advisor. He later convinced a guild of horses to fight Lord Voldemort. This did not win me any prizes, but it did make me susceptible to the dreaded writing bug. My stories have evolved since then--the main characters have grown older and older, and my vocabulary has gotten bigger and bigger--but I still have just as much fun making words sing. My current work, which I hope you enlightened mentors see as befitting as a bard, is an adult fantasy set in a universe inspired by a mix of ancient Polynesia and other seafaring civilizations. A mother and her teenage daughter have to sail across the world to complete an ancient blood offering, and have to put aside their differences to dispatch the many threats on the ocean, including a demonic wind that shoots jets of water and large sea creatures at unsuspecting boats.

Wait, wait, I'm not finished yet!

When I do not expedition as a bard, I ply my trade as an English teacher in Taipei, Taiwan. I like to take my names for fantasy islands and races from how my students misspell words on their vocabulary tests; their errors are far more creative than my brainstorming. I live with my roommate, my roommate's plants, and the cockroaches that just can't resist sneaking in when I leave the door slightly open. They do not have names. If I name them, I give them power, and if we give the cockroaches power, they will soon take over the house and turn it into a scene from A Bug's Life. We only name the mice. They can be reasoned with. I choose to avoid them both, and write in the nearest coffee shop or McDonald's. When I'm not writing, I'm reading. I obsess over David Mitchell, J.K. Rowling, all shades of Russian literature, and any shade of speculative fiction with biting prose. 

But of course, you are not here to read my life story. I know that people require more than just cockroach naming for their party. As a Level 3 bard searching for an experienced mentor to accept me into their party, I am honour-bound to present my sheet. Now, personally, I find the basic sheet awfully crude. A listing of attributes should be unnecessary for a man of letters, more befitting to those who wound with their hands rather than their words like rogues or barbarians, but I digress. It is the way of the land for those who mean to boldly expedition through Pitchwarsia and its surrounding kingdoms, and boldly expedition is what I must do.

We will start from the top, with explanations.

As a level three bard, I have the necessary training to aid any party, although I will confess to not necessarily being proficient in all of them. My dexterity, I am afraid, only accounts for scribbling words and flipping pages, as I am useless with any weapon more complex than a stick. Likewise, I only have enough heft to heft potted plants. I am not the bard to rearrange carriages. Don't let my Chaotic Neutral alignment worry you too much. You see, my characters loathe me far too much for me to ever earn anything kinder or gentler. They do not seem to appreciate me killing their children, their parents, and their pets. I live in fear that they'll discover my meagre hit points.

I have spent time burnishing an academic's skillset. After all, a good bard and a good scribe must also be a good researcher! I consider my inkpen to be the most magical device that I could ever use, for worlds flow out of its end. I decipher all sorts of (manu)scripts, from the simpler Roald Dahls

to the more complex Fyodor Dostoevskys.

I come equipped with a heavy horse, for I am a heavy man. I carry a crossbow and longbow mostly for appearances. Don't crossbows and longbows look cool? They do, don't they? The key here is the ink and paper. A true bard must always be prepared for inspiration to strike, whether in the middle of a dream or the middle of a hike. I carry books of all stripes with me...significantly more than I should, considering my wanderings. I also carry a laptop, in case I ever learn to cast a spell to charge in on the road, and a sack of coffee grounds, because you and I both know that this will become necessary.

What kind of a storytelling bard would I be if I didn't have a feat in scribing scrolls? I have great knowledge of bardic music and bardic knowledge, but I'm afraid that I do require a shower to truly sing well. In addition to my well honed language skills, I also have above basic language proficiency in French, Russian and Mandarin, honed by my time living in Ottawa, Saint Petersburg, and Taipei. My draconic mostly comes from needing to find a way to communicate with my most rage-fuelled students.

These bard spells are all essential for me to practice my literary craft. As literature is magic, being able to read it would be essential. How can I read and write at night if I cannot create light? My level one spells are more stylistic choices. I write to inspire feelings, and there are few feelings more potent than fear. I can make myself sleep at the drop of the hat; some of my best sleeping spots include a pine box in the middle of the woods not usually meant for sleeping. And at times, when the darkness becomes too strong, it becomes necessary to cast uncontrollable, hideous, spine-bending laughter, to ensure that there's still some positivity remaining in your soul, no matter how twisted.

And no matter how much it confuses everyone around you.

So why would I be an ideal fit for your party on any venturing forth from Pitchwarsia? I may be a bard, but thanks to my teaching experience, I have the patience of a monk and a cleric. I weave my stories with a druid's love of nature, and a sorcerer or wizard's love of the magic of words. I write with no fear of barbarians, nor rogues, and explore them with the confidence of a ranger. I smash chaotic neutral against lawful evil and write the ashes as they settle. Whether we encounter a kobold, or something far larger, I give my bard's word that I will clutch my crossbow and my inkpen and stand boldly in the way. For if there are no tales to tell, then what are we fighting for?

I thank you for your time and consideration in reading my sheet and my script. Let us boldly go forth, together, from Pitchwarsia and into the dangers that lurk beyond.

No obstacles would be too much for us.

For more mentee bios, pop over to Christopher Keelty's site for the mentee blog hop!

Where to write, where to write, where to write...

I am currently sitting in a car, driving from Toronto to Ottawa. This is a reasonably comfortable car. I can fully stretch my legs out in the back seat, which is a rare gift for someone over six feet tall. My laptop is hooked up to a mobile charger. This is a good place to write.

Last night, I was on a pull out futon in my cousin’s basement. It was reasonably comfortable, as far as futons go. There were no loose planks of wood jutting into my back. It was almost long enough to let me stretch out fully. It was plugged into a power bar. That was a horrible place to write.

As much as I enjoy writing, it is downright shameful that I am so finicky about my writing spaces. I don’t need a perfect storm of atmospheric glory to buckle down and write, but it certainly helps. I can tell when reading my manuscript whether I was in a good or bad place to write. My good writing places result in more vivid, imaginative, emotional writing. My bad writing places get ground up by the great chomping edit machine more often than not.

I’m sure that every writer has their own perfect writing days that they’re constantly trying to recreate. It’s almost like Captain Ahab and Moby Dick; you want to take another elusive glance at something that’s always out of reach. For me, two days come to mind, neither of which are anywhere near duplicable. The first came on a gorgeous summer day on Vasilyevsky Island in Saint Petersburg, Russia, when I sat in a park with bright flowers and towering fountains and wrote for an hour about canoes. The second is far less picturesque. I was feeling sick, stressed and unable to sleep at 2 A.M., so I threw a blanket over myself, propped myself up in my living room IKEA chair, and wrote for two hours about grief.

I’ve tried to recreate these two golden writing experiences (the first one more than the second, because I was wading through misery that I’m not keen on recreating) and it hasn’t worked. No park has been able to trigger the same feelings of “THIS IS PERFECT IN EVERY WAY” that the park on Vasilyevsky Island did. I’ve sat in that same creaky IKEA chair many times, but I haven’t been able to fall into my writing in the same way. Failing to capture the necessary conditions, I cycle through every permutation of location and emotion to find something that clicks. Coffee shops generally do the trick, as long as I’ve engaged my SelfControl app that blocks Twitter, Facebook, and every other distraction. Trains do too, and I’ve done some great writing on the Taipei MRT. My home does not. Airplanes are hit and miss for me. It really depends on how much leg room I have, and if the screaming babies next to me are loud enough to breach my headphones and make my brain slowly leak out through my ears.

Recently, I’ve stopped trying to recreate my perfect writing days. I figure that I’m reaching for something that doesn’t really exist. They weren’t perfect days because I was filled with the spirit of some goddess of writing. They were perfect days because I was really proud of what I was putting on paper. I really felt like I captured my main character’s grief an emotional turmoil when my torso was sinking into those festering black IKEA cushions. It wasn’t Swedish design that made me write well. Besides, my second perfect writing day came about because I decided I’d rather write than vomit. It would have been good whether I was in my stained IKEA chair, or sitting in McDonald’s and munching on fries, or sitting alone on a log in a forest. Ultimately, if your story wants to come out, it’ll come out, no matter where your posterior happens to be.