From Edie: Feeling distracted and overwhelmed as a writer? Discover how to identify the “weeds” in your writing life and take practical steps to stay focused, protect your time, and nurture what matters most.
Weeds in Your Writing Life? How to Eliminate Distractions and Stay Focused as a Writer
by Tim Suddeth @TimSuddeth
Do you have weeds in your garden?
What? Why’d you look at me like that?
Probably because we know that all gardens have weeds. Even Augusta National. (I know. I know. I just committed a terrible blasphemy.)
But weeds are like aphids; they get into everything. And it takes a Herculean effort to keep them from taking over a garden. And it’s never-ending for a gardener. You can spend an entire weekend making your garden just so, just perfect. But on Monday morning, when you step out the door into your garden. Holding your cup of coffee and with the smug feeling of accomplishment, a dandelion will be peeking at you from under the camellia, mocking you. (Yes, it is personal with weeds.)
The problem with having weeds is that they ruin the visual you wanted, they take up space, and they sap away energy.
As a writer, can you relate? Don’t little things often sneak into our routines, our thoughts, that, like weeds, take away from the writing we want to accomplish?
Like a gardener, we don’t want any pesky weeds sneaking into our writing lives. Right?
Ways to Prevent Writing Weeds from Developing
1. To prevent weeds from taking over, we first need to keep them from forming. A gardener does this by laying down landscape fabric and mulch.
The writer can set up routines to get them into their writing without, or at least with less, being tempted to do something, anything, else. Some writers set up their computers the night before and start their day by taking their coffee to their desks. Sometimes it’s finding a quiet-ish corner of the house and putting up a sign to warn others in the house away. And sometimes it’s writing when the kiddoe is doing her homework.
2. Another thing a gardener must do to prevent weeds from growing is to identify what they want to grow and where. They need to be able to tell what the desired plant is so they can weed out the other plants that are competing for space.
If you’re growing a row of beans, after about a week, you’re going to see a line of green sprouts with a pair of uniform green leaves. That’s the bean plant. Anything else needs to go to have the best crop of beans.
As writers, and just in our daily lives, we need to identify what’s important, what our goals are, and what our family needs are. Then we need to carve out the time and resources necessary to meet them. We can do this, but it’ll take prayer, communication with those in our lives, and being honest with ourselves to do it.
You may want to plant all of your seeds in one hole. In other words, to be able to do it all. (Isn’t that how we wish our lives worked? Then everything would come up and be beautiful.). But if everything is in one hole, they won’t have the room they need to grow. And none of us can do it all, When we try, we have a big fall in our future.
3. Another way we stop weeds from taking over, they have popped up, is by taking control. Yanking them out—roots and all. And the sooner you pull them the better. Because the longer you wait, the bigger they grow and multiply. (Sound familiar? It’s the problems we try to ignore that end up causing the most damage.) A gardener guards against weeds by constantly walking through their garden, scanning the ground for those first little leaves.
As writers, we do this by realizing when we don’t have the energy to do adequate work or have the time to reach our deadlines. A problem with deadlines is that we have to meet them while we must fulfill the other obligations we have. Doing that blog post might be nice, but only you are the parent who teaches your two-year-old son to chase a butterfly. Don’t miss those opportunities. Those are the real gifts in our lives.
Writers need to use the same vigilance it takes to keep weeds out of a garden guarding their obligations: their time management, their favorite writing tools, their social media. And no, social media is not a weed. Usually. But sometimes. More about this later.
An interesting thing about weeds is that there is no one weed plant. But any plant can be a weed. A weed is just a plant in the wrong place. Our front yard is covered in dandelions, clover, and wild violets. They have beautiful blooms. And if they were out in a field, we’d call them wildflowers. The bees buzzing around them. But in a yard, the sight of them could give the homeowner a twinge.
That’s how weeds are in our writing and in our lives. They can be good things. But in this case, they are stealing our energy and creativity. Each of the thirty-dozen-ish social media sites may be great for its purpose. That doesn’t mean you have to be on each one. You don’t have the time or the brain-width. God didn’t create you to do everything or solve everyone’s problems. So, we need—we must—choose what is best and necessary to meet your, not others, goals.
To do this, we need to focus on the plan—the garden—that God has made. After all, our writing and lives, like a garden, have been carefully designed and developed. So be careful that you don’t become so overloaded with weeds that you can’t see His chosen flowers for your life. They’re there. He planted them. (All my days were planned before a single one of them began. Psalm 139:16)
How about the days when you feel like a weed? When, like Paul, you do the things you shouldn’t and don’t do the things you should? What should we do then?
First, check with the Gardener for His plan and direction (Don’t touch the peonies.). Pray, read the Bible. But don’t just read it for information or to check it off your to-do list. Read it in order to know your Lord better. That’s why He wrote it.
Then realize that maybe, really, you aren’t a weed. But, instead, you’re a flower. One He has placed in a carefully chosen spot.
So, go out and bloom. (But please, hold back on your pollen. Achoo!)
TWEETABLE
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