How Writers Can Make Peace With Their Busy Minds
Photo by fotografierende on Unsplash
About The Author:
Autumn Krause is the author of A Dress For The Wicked, out now from Harper Collins Teen. While working as a bridal gown stylist in Beverly Hills, she received her MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
She's since settled in Orange County, California with her husband and two children and writes young adult novels, features for home design magazines, and freelances for a variety of other publications. Autumn can most often be found wearing a black lace dress and taking an #ootd photo for her Instagram (@autumnsarahstory).
For as long as I can remember, my mind has been the equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. A white space slashed through with dripping colors, streaks, and dashes, my attention jumping from one splotch to the next at speeds only found on the Autobahn. Essentially, unmanaged mental chaos.
Enter #adulting, social media, and a career as a writer. I now work from anywhere at any time, which means the only accountability I have are the deadlines looming in the not-so-distant future. My mind, which was always unruly as a child, is now even more distracted and antsy, relentlessly consuming content on Instagram and Pinterest and compelling me to type random Google searches for Buckingham Palace’s menus, even though nothing in my work requires this spontaneous research.
The further I establish my career, the more I loathe myself and my inability to focus. My mind feels broken, which makes me feel broken by extension. Once, as I’m working at a coffee shop, the barista notices that I stop writing every few minutes to go fantasy shopping on Anthropologie.com and I think that I’m failing at my career. After all, how will I write a novel with my mind demanding breaks and stops and strolls through the digital boroughs of Amazon?
But then I do write a novel, and it’s published by Harper Collins. Looking at it, I’m not so sure where all those words came from, yet I do know because each one is near and dear to my heart, and somehow they all found their way from my scattered mind to the page.
That’s when I suddenly wonder if my mind, with its blinking lights and thoughts catapulting through the white matter of my brain, has its own sort of creative process. I wonder if my guilt comes from the world telling me that I need to focus, that social media is a waste of time. I wonder if this isn’t entirely true. That I need the rush and the wind and constant stops and starts.
I decide to investigate further by researching other writers and their daily habits. I expect to find discipline but find instead brethren. Maya Angelou, in a 2013 interview with The Daily Beast, notes that she enters her writer’s den with a “Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary, and a Bible. Usually a deck of cards and some crossword puzzles.”
E.B. White told The Paris Review that he writes in his living room, which is “at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. There’s lots of traffic…but I often use it as a room to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me.”
Kurt Vonnegut, in a 1965 letter to his wife (published in Kurt Vonnegut: Letters), confided that his writing is done around breakfast, a few walks about town, errands, swims in the municipal pools, and reading mail—oh, and also pushups and sit-ups, done “all the time.”
For these writers, distractions are invited into their literary lives. They are seen as fuel, not a lack of self-control.
With the rise of social media, sound bites, and short video clips speeding by as we scroll through our phones, we attribute all of it as white noise that inhibits our lives—and it can be. But it can also be part of a delicate balance, an artful push-and-pull between noise and silence. Somewhere between the two can live inspiration and magic and everything colliding together to give us our one true voice.
Research shows our minds are intricate and can process many things at one time, but we often don’t hold any space for this and shame ourselves for our natural predispositions. It was only after I realized this that I let myself develop my own process. Now, I don’t fight my need to stop every few minutes. While the cursor is blinking on my Word document, my mind is still working, even as my eyes rest on the latest offerings on H&M.com.
So if you, like me, have a busy mind, see it as a beautiful thing. It’s a hungry mind, a curious mind, and it finds interest in many things. It’s okay to work with its urges for pauses and distractions, even though the thrust of our world tells us not to. It’s in those moments that you’ll find yourself—and better yet, your story. That wild and winding thing that finds fuel in freedom.
Tips for Writers With Busy Minds
Set parameters around your breaks, but don’t necessarily limit the amount you take.
Orient your breaks toward your tasks. If you’re writing a novel on fashion, for example, look up designer’s collections!
Look for overall progress, not perfection. If your word count is low one day, don’t beat yourself up.
