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Creative Writing – Life or Death Focus Needed
By Deb Gallardo
Dan Goodwin does it again. He’s written a phenomenal post on creativity and focus. As writers, we all know it’s impossible to focus on writing when we’re being bombarded by distractions. It’s bad enough when the phone or email distract us, but ideas are GOOD THINGS! We want them — even desperately need them. But they can be even more distracting than interruptions in our day, because they tug at us. They’re like little children jumping up and down squealing, “Pay attention to me! Pay attention to me!” This can derail any project we’re currently working on.
Dan, in his inimitable style, says it’s perfectly normal to get ideas while we’re busy being creative with something else. The key is to make note of the idea with enough detail that you will remember it later (For some of us who are Baby Boomers, this is a key factor, as we can’t even remember where we put our keys, let alone what we meant when we wrote: “Mt SM scene: dngn, high tide”).
He cautions us on immediately pursuing a new idea that comes to us while working on another creative project, using a surgeon as an example:
Can you imagine a heart surgeon just after opening someone’s chest for a triple bypass saying “Hang on, I’m bored with this one, maybe I should go work on that 7 year old girl that needs the transplant? Or should I go and start on the car crash victim that came in last night and is in intensive care?”?
Doesn’t that put this into its proper perspective? It does for me. Creative ideas are gifts and each one deserves our focus and attention as though it were a life and death situation. There will always be another creative project. We can learn to deal with them one at a time and rest secure in the knowledge that as highly creative people, we will never run out of ideas. And that’s a GOOD THING!
Read Creative Focus: What You Can Learn From Heart Surgery About Getting Creatively Focused
________________________________________________________________________________ Welcome Back! Comment, recommend and stop by regularly. There are 100s of posts on writing -- especially FINDING STORY IDEAS. Enjoy! ________________________________________________________________________________Related Posts
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October 20th, 2009 at 12:15 am
[...] Ideas Virtuoso featuring the expertise of Dan Goodwin, all of which open in their own windows: Creative Writing: Life or Death Focus Needed Writer’s Block – Fear of Creating Creative Writing Ideas – A Neverending Supply [...]