Positive Distractions?

Ah, the mind is a wonderful thing. Except when it is actively derailing you, looking for stimulation from the open window, the sounds of laughter down the hall, or the ever-present screed of human experience on Facebook and GooglePlus. I'm talking about distraction here, but particularly the kind of distraction that a writer has to fight off while writing a long piece of work.

Distraction is, quite frankly, a nightmare and a near constant problem for virtually every writer I know. Distraction leads to the Dark Side, to procrastination and generally getting less--or any--work done. But is it always so? Is that a 100% guarantee, a tarnished golden rule.

Well, if you are like me, then the answer is... no. Distraction might well lead to time wasted 98% or even 99% of the time, but every once in a while--particularly I find while working on longer pieces--distraction can be generative, in a good way. Sure, it's dragging you off-topic, but sometimes the result is actually quite helpful or, at least, interesting.

For example, whilst writing a piece of game fiction (usually working to a deadline), I might be distracted with daydreams of a work of Speculative Fiction or Fantasy. I used to actively try to shut these out, to focus on the work at hand, but increasingly I have been taking short breaks to write down the thoughts and ideas that come unbidden. Interestingly, as I've taken to doing this, these generative distractions have become more fruitful.

I might come away with a few lines of dialogue between characters I haven't even dreamt up yet. I might come away with a description of setting or action that doesn't have a home in anything I'm writing. Or I might come up with something like this:

"In that moment, he faced the darkness alone. The cold stone against his shoulders chilling him as the dull beat within his breast slowed. He lay helpless, bereft of any earthly protection. Time slowed around him. The all-encompassing shadow smothered him, stripping him of his senses, of all avenues of awareness—save for one. In that darkness, he was suddenly aware of the singularity of his soul. A mote of dust tumbling in a vacuum. And with that awareness came something else: the crushing realization of his own insignificance."

The paragraph above is the result of a distraction-break I took while writing up a piece of academic policy. The mind, as I said above, is a wonderful thing. I don't count myself as particularly capable where multitasking is concerned, but clearly my subconscious was working away in the background while I was composing a Higher Education policy statement. Even more fortuitous is the fact that I believe I know where I can use this paragraph.

So increasingly I am of two minds--there's a pun in there somewhere--about distractions. I cannot, and would not attempt to, deny that distraction as a whole is a major problem for writings. Indeed, I agree with that readily. But every once in a while, it proves useful, leads to something really interesting and useful. I now have a folder on my desktop full of ideas, random writings, and a few little vignettes. My hope is that, given time, I can come back to most, if not all, of these elements and find a place for this.

For now, my lunch is over and that policy document is not going to write itself. I can only hope that my subconscious will be actively chugging away at some new creative idea and that I will have the opportunity to capture it, pop it in my desktop folder, and make good use of it sometime in the future.