Distractions When Writing

I’m participating in NaNoWriMo this month and have realised that I get distracted VERY EASILY! I’m a mixture of a procrastinator and a lazy person, and this does not result in a very high word count. It results in a jumbled mess of words. Here are a few examples of how I’ve been lazy in my writing:

When I can’t think of dialogue:

When I can’t think of description:

Besides from my laziness in writing, my laziness before I even start writing is much worse! Here are the things that distract me from writing.

Television

Television is one of the worst perpetrators! I write mostly at night, and the evening is when the best shows are on. I usually get more distracted by shows or movies that are airing than Netflix because I try not to get hooked on a show when I want to write. The other night, for example, I put the television on while I had my WIP open on my laptop and watched the end of Holes (2003) and the start of Dying Young (1991). I didn’t even want to watch those movies! The noise from the movies completely threw me off and it took me three times as long to write, yet I kept it on any way!

Going Out

I’m on a four-month break from university at the moment, which means I have a lot of free time. Technically I shouldn’t be having any distractions! As I like writing in the evening the most, it’s really hard to get something written when I have somewhere to go at night time. I guess I should plan ahead, but…I’m not that smart.

Twitter

I used to use Tumblr but now Twitter is what I use to fulfil my need to endlessly scroll down people’s random thoughts. I find it pretty boring most of the time and I will only do it for a few minutes, but I like seeing how other Twitter accounts I follow are doing with their NaNo progress.

YouTube

YouTube also distractions me a lot! When I get tired of writing I will go straight to YouTube to watch a video, and then it will turn into another video and then another video. It takes a lot for me to click out of YouTube. When I was doing assignments at university, I would just close all tabs that distracted me and that really helped. Maybe I should do the same when I’m writing.

Phone

My phone easily prevents me from writing. I’m on my phone for about half of the day (okay, maybe not). But still, it’s a big problem. If I get a notification I’m going to respond to it quickly because I hate having little red circles all over my apps. This makes it hard for me to ignore my phone.

Writing/Reading Blog Posts

I should technically be writing right now, yet here I am writing a blog post! The idea for this post just came to me and I had to write it down before I lost interest in getting it written. Sometimes I’ll be in a writing mood, but will use all of that energy for my blog instead of my WIP. And then I’ll just feel like writing blog posts all night.

Reading blog posts is also distracting! I will be writing a blog post and might get a notification, which will remind me to read blog posts, and that takes me a while to get through.

Reading

I was almost going to leave reading off the list! I’ve barely been reading anything during NaNoWriMo. This past month I’ve only ever felt like reading for about thirty minutes before bed. When I was going to uni, I would get to read on the train and that allowed me more opportunities to read. But now that I’ve finished uni, I only catch the train about once a week and therefore get less time throughout my week to read! And then night time comes around and I will choose writing over reading! So that’s why this point shouldn’t really be on the list…but I thought it would make sense seeing as this is a book blog.

• Do you suffer from the same problem?
• Do you have any other distractions?