You know, I'm a reasonably focused person. My brother, poor guy, got most of the ADHD in the family: I tend to be able to focus on one thing at a time. (The exception being when a TV is turned on in the room. My brain just clicks right off.)
Yet when I'm writing I can usually only make it through a sentence before I click over to the Internet or iTunes or email, or wander over to the fridge or the teapot. I have no idea what my brain does in those minutes or why it needs to distract me. Sometimes I am honestly still thinking about the story and what to do next or how to phrase a bit of dialogue, in which case I'll wander around thinking about it until I work out the problem. Then I'll hurry back to the computer and go back to writing.
More often, though, I stop thinking about the story entirely for big chunks of time. Social media critics will claim this is the result of a digital age, but I remember being like this back when I was scratching out my stories when pen and notebook paper.
Once, I had a friend of mine make the--admittedly pretentious--statement that good writers are either Mozarts or Beethovens. Either the notes (or words) spout out like mad, or they are laborious and edited a hundred times over before they're ever committed to the page, and a hundred times after that, too.
So now I hate Mozart.
In other news, Editor Jenn (who edited Timshel) now has her own website!
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