I read the best essay about writing today from a writer named Angela Yuriko Smith who manages the Substack page and newsletter called Authortunities. She’s pretty cool and has some great ideas. We don’t agree on everything, but I love how she justifies her thoughts. She’s smart and she loves helping writers.

Today she spoke of Protecting Your Lightning. In essence, we are surrounded by distractions. Phones, family, social media, etc. Worse, everyone has an urgency to them, thinking that since life is faster, that responses ought to be quick all around. That includes demands on you. “Our attention is a commodity,” she says, and she isn’t wrong.

There’s lots of good metaphors and comparisons in the piece, but my favorite was the intentional vs. gravitational way we deal with it all. Having information at our fingertips is great. . . when we need it. But when we just scroll for the sake of scrolling, a lot doesn’t get done. . . like writing.

And it stifles our creativity and productivity.

Develop habits and be religious about maintaining them. Stick to what you sat down at the keyboard to do. . . or shut down the social media to put your butt in the chair in front of the keyboard in the first place.

Don’t throw away your minutes by allowing the world’s noise to distract you, because a few minutes become hours, and hours become habits. Then you find yourself making excuses why you haven’t done a darn thing to get your beautiful creativity done. And as I frequently say, when you are a writing, success or failure is all on you.