Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Most people in the world don’t celebrate Christmas, and far fewer celebrate it in a religious fashion. I celebrate it in a benevolent commercial way. I don’t believe in a higher power, but I do enjoy the opportunity to be with friends and family and the exchanging of gifts in the process.

My wife and I alternate which family we visit each year and this year we went to Seattle (where I grew up) to visit my family. We rented an airbnb and had over 20 people under one roof. That being said, any hopes I had of writing or continuing my reading goals were thoroughly dashed, and the only productive time I had was on the plane where I managed to get through about two thirds of Boneshaker while helping to manage our four-year-old and his airplane-bathroom-shy-bladder problems. There were a lot of trips to that bathroom.

This delay in productivity however gave me the idea of what to write about today. Distractions.

I’ll be the first to admit that my main distraction is my phone. Facebook, mobile games, internet rabbit holes, they’re all regular culprits for my lost hours. For a while I was actively playing far too many games: Disney Emoji Blitz, Hero Wars, and Clash Royale being the main culprits. In October I cut myself off from all games except Clash, which was to be my kill-five-minutes-game as opposed to a regularly played thing. The idea was I’d have more time to write and work.

That didn’t exactly go as planned. I did cut out all but Clash, but still play it a bit more than planned. The upside is I did get more writing done and I have larger chunks of time for reading. So distractions reduced, but not eliminated.

The next distraction I want to mention is TV/movies. I’m a huge cinephile. It’s got to the point when I make references in my friend group that I just assume no one will get them and usually that’s what happens. With my kid around I watch much less than I did before since he needs attention and I can’t exactly put John Wick on in the background. That means once he’s asleep I’m much more motivated to catch up on a show or movie I’m behind on than to be productive.

Practically speaking, I wouldn’t be able to write if I wanted to. He’s asleep at 8:00 and my brain has checked out for anything more than entertainment input. A book is entirely feasible, but more often than not the TV gets powered on, the hum of Netflix triggering those endorphins. I haven’t found a good way around this distraction. There are too many interesting shows and movies out there to watch them all, so I do what I can.

The last real distraction I struggle with, and I challenge any writer to deny their struggle as well, is the new idea. No matter the project, something you write or see or dream will inspire and drag your thoughts to something new, something unconnected with what you’re trying to complete. For me it’s usually dream based as that’s where most of the kernels of my ideas come from, but this distraction can come from anywhere.

My current distraction came from a dream and is a murder mystery. The dream played out like watching a movie, the roles featuring well known actors playing characters and I was the viewer following the drama and intrigue. But before I witness the resolution I woke and was left with a legit “whodunit” thought. And so for a couple days I completely forgot about my novel and my reading and thought about this new story.

I don’t want to give much away in case I do write this at some point, but Tom Cruise was killed, and Hailee Steinfeld was Nancy Drew-ing her way through suspects to figure out who did the deed. Alongside those two were Jack Black, Delroy Lindo, Helen Mirren, Stanley Tucci, Eugene Cordero, Ben Mendelsohn, and Timothee Chalamet among others. But based on what I’d seen in the dream and what my detective fiction knowledge told me to do I’ve now figured out the killer(s), motives, and opportunities. I’ve also assigned backstories to each character as well as each set of characters. There’s no reason two suspects might not be at odds with each other as well as with the deceased.

This distraction was particularly hard to ignore given my fondness for the genre. My senior thesis was on detective fiction, specifically Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins stories. I’ve a list of mystery plots already on file and I try to watch them whenever I can (I just watched Glass Onion which was good in presentation but sad in that there are visual tactics that just don’t translate to the written word, and I recently rewatched Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, which if you’re an old noir movie fan you must give it a watch).

While I was victim to this distraction, I was able to limit it. I had to scratch the itch, that was a given. But once the itch was scratched, I couldn’t just leave it alone. So, like so many other ideas, it went to the idea notebook.

My notebook is digital so I can access it on any device, but any notebook will do. I use OneNote since it’s very good at simple organization and the interface is very user friendly. Once I have a story idea, whether it’s an inkling or more fleshed out, it goes there until I’m done with my current project. It’s a great way to group ideas, not just to write later, but sometimes to combine and weave together. A good story doesn’t have just one through line to engage the reader, but many smaller stories told in conjunction. By grouping ideas together in one place or side by side, many complimentary ideas can be combined that may have otherwise been overlooked.

I see that I’ve derailed somewhat from my topic of distractions. But isn’t that was a distraction is? Our minds inherently want to discover, to learn or experience something new. And we need that for creative growth, for those subconscious influences and at times the more overt ones. So is my advice to cut out all distractions? No. Just limit them. Find out what distractions are beneficial to your craft (Glass Onion) and what ones are less so (Emoji Blitz). Embrace your distractions, but do so on your terms, not theirs.