photo credit: timailius

As well as writing for tech blogs, I also try to write fiction. I’ve submitted a few pieces to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery magazine and Strand Magazine in the past. I specialise in crime, mystery, childrens stories and the occasional spot of science-fiction. But I haven’t had anything published yet for the following reasons :

• It’s an intensely competitive market and therefore extremely difficult to break into.
• I find it difficult to find fiction subjects to write about that haven’t already been covered.
• Fiction is a totally different kettle of fish than non-fiction. With non-fiction, you’re reporting the facts of a subject and no more. With fiction, you have to work out a plot, establish characters, settings, descriptions, feelings, actions, flesh all that out and much more. Then carry it on for at least 5000 words or more.
• The longer I work on one single piece, the harder I find it to concentrate. There’s always something else to do, something on the internet to look at, something on the TV to watch, a book to read, your back is hurting, your ass is uncomfortable on the chair, etc, etc.
• Truly good fiction requires multiple re-writes which requires a huge investment in time and energy. Writing fiction is rewarding but it is really mentally exhausting.
• You also have to have a huge, perhaps cocky, arrogant belief in your story that it is the best thing since sliced bread. I on the other hand am brutally honest with myself. If I see that my story sucks, I tell myself that immediately and I hit the delete button.

So for those reasons alone, my fiction writing has up to now remained a hobby but I aim to change that soon and quickly. Mainly I want to boost my income significantly but also I have a huge desire to expand my writing horizons into other areas.

But out of all the problem areas above, the biggest one is the concentration issue. To write damn good fiction, you need the concentration and iron discipline of a zen monk. Or as I like to say, you need “mojo”. After analysing all of my past failings, I’ve worked out where most of my distractions were coming from - Microsoft Word.

Yes, that’s right, Microsoft Word. No, that’s not pathetic buck passing. Think about it for a moment. When you type something in Microsoft Word, how often do you fiddle around with the fonts? How often do you adjust the margins? How often do you change the formatting in other ways? How many times do you press the word count button?

More to the point, how often do you do these things without realising you’re doing it?

I’m not finished. How often do you tweak the Word toolbars to get a really cool shaded title bar on your first page? Numbered pages? Centered numbers? The title of the file on each page? Formatted images? Clickable contents page?

Then when you’ve got things the way you want them, how often does Word then reverse what you’ve done, forcing you to start again?

You see what I mean? There are so many distractions on Microsoft Word that you lose sight of what you opened Word for in the first place. Out of 60 minutes you’ve assigned yourself to write your daily quota, you spend perhaps 45 minutes of that time pimping up your document to make it look nice. Microsoft Word truly is a productivity killer, whether intentional or unintentional. It makes us obsessed with creating pretty little documents when what we should really be doing is getting on with the actual work.

So today I decided to stop using Microsoft Word. I’ll still use it for presenting the final manuscripts to publishers but during the actual writing of the manuscripts, I will be using Microsoft Notepad instead. The beauty of Notepad is its spartan design. It has no toolbars, no multiple fonts, no colours. It’s just a blank page with a cursor.

Earlier I opened Notepad and started typing my first fiction story in over 8 months. 30 minutes later, I had 500 words. OK, it was a very rough draft but it was still 500 words!

So there’s the secret to writing more - ditch Word and use a distraction-free application such as Notepad. I guarantee you’ll see a positive difference.

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