I’m so excited to return to Seattle!
I first attended in 2024, and had some incredibly fun panels there. One session was a live DnD with Marissa Meyer and our amazing DM, Margaret Owen. This year I will be on a craft and education panel with my colleagues Nikhil Prabala and Beth Dolgner discuss Defeating Distraction, Balancing Your Creative Self in a Cluttered World.
On my walk today I reflected on the tips and techniques I could share with attendees on how to protect their creative focus. This was a topic that definitely made me feel like an impostor because often I feel quite scattered. But my feelings are not reality and the facts are that Ken and I have written over 10+ novels together since 2017, and I solo drafted a novel in 2016, and continue to draft a number of shorter works throughout the year. That doesn’t happen by accident.
Three things that have helped me protect my creative working time:
- I go analog. Often I will resort to pen and paper to journal and brainstorm. This requires me to put down my phone.
- I pair dictation with my walks. This lets me use kinetic energy to kickstart my brain and tell myself the story. This zero draft obviously gets revised later but what I find is that my dictation allows for more natural dialogue and some interesting interiority for my characters.
- I schedule my distractions. That sounds a little nuts but because I know my brain will do all kinds chaotic associations leading me down research rabbit holes, I try to schedule my research sessions for the same time each day. That puts some boundaries about how much I let myself do this, and because I know it will happen again the next day, I don’t feel reluctant to end my research session.
See you in Seattle!
Julia Vee 