“I can resist anything except temptation.” – Oscar Wilde
Wilde’s amusingly accurate quote lies at the core of my writing discipline, such as it is: if temptation can not be resisted, it must be removed. Which is to say, I mostly manage to write once I have made it impossible to do anything else.
I’m one of those terrible café writers, the sort who spend hours nursing a single coffee while tapping away. This is not because I want to be seen writing, which is the general stereotype about café writers, but because I am incapable of working at home, where there are so many constant tugs on my attention. Laundry to be done! Emails to be answered! Puttering to be putted! Embarrassing as it may be, I’m much more productive now that I’ve accepted my weakness.
Hence, the café, and the laptop with disabled wireless access. (I am among the few who mourned when Starbucks introduced free wifi; although my machine doesn’t log-on automatically, knowing the option exists is a breech of the temptation avoidance rules.) Access to the Internet inevitably leads to meandering on the internet, usually under the pretext of looking up “just one thing”. Zero tolerance is the only policy which really works for me.
Those of you who can plonk down in the middle of everything and focus: how do you do it? Temptation-riddled minds want to know!