How You Can Increase Focus And Get To Writing

Brenda H.
5 min readJul 16, 2022

Environmental Changes Can Improve Your Chances of Increasing A Flow State

Photo by Chase Clark on Unsplash

I set aside 45 minutes, Julia Cameron-morning-pages-style, and 30 minutes into that, the dog threw up.

Stop the writing and sop up the mess. When I let out the dog, she ate grass (no, not THAT KIND of grass, the dry burnt in the Texas sun kind of grass). So, after that sloppy mess, I lost interest in picking back up my dropped sentence.

Cameron, who wrote The Artist’s Way and The Right to Write, recommends stream of consciousness writing first thing in the morning as a “bedrock tool of a creative recovery.”

This piece replaces the previous one, which was disgustingly interrupted.

If you’re a hermit without modern world distractions, maybe you can dedicate time to focus from the beginning and allow it to flow to the natural conclusion.

Most of us don’t have that luxury. And it could be that hermits don’t either. And perhaps this is best because distractions are what stories are made of.

Annie Dillard, who does have the luxury to set up her life as a writing hermit, also runs into unexpected interruptions. To complete her writing projects, Ms. Dillard often rents homes, cottages, or pine…

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Brenda H.
Brenda H.

Written by Brenda H.

A not-yet-60-year-old Texas transplant is making retirement plans for anywhere else but here. Educated by School of Hard Knocks. Today is Once in a Lifetime.

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