How difficult it is to keep our focus…especially these days. Distraction of an individual from a task or mission has become almost an artform. In fact, this constant battle for our attention has become so specialized that it many ways it has become as strategic as corporate marketing plans.
Now not all marketing is bad…let’s be clear. Some of it can be informative…but a great deal of it is downright communication noise…social media could be a great example. It can take our eye off the real pursuit of the craft of writing. But it’s not always marketing that distracts.
This is really true of inexperienced writers who are trying to learn the craft, but get distracted by shiny things like shortcuts to publication, foolproof ways of catching the eye of an acquisitions editor, building your platform, or some other way that could compress the developmental timeline to some measurable level of success.
There is obviously a lot of good advice out there for fledgling writers trying to navigate the writing waters and learning how to create quality fiction or nonfiction. But it can be difficult to tell what that is for them. It can help to ask the questions ‘where am I in my development’ or ‘what do I most need to learn right now?’
I’m trying to concentrate my efforts on the elements of good storytelling…the basics. These other things are interesting and have value no doubt, but I’m not there yet. There are a lot of squirrels we can chase for fun or just out of personal interest, but that can be exhausting and many times we don’t have a lot to show for it.
While it’s good to know how to write a knockout book proposal, for example, sometimes we can get caught up in the learning the tricks of the trade and forget about learning the trade.
My Storm Farm 