Websites as Crutches

For the most part, I aspire to keep away from distractions. However, I find that good ambient sound works well for creating a cone of privacy around me while I'm writing. Especially when there are noise cancelling headphones involved. Therefore, I usually have YouTube up in the background. I'll run 3+ hour dark scifi, dystopian, or horror ambient tracks. I have specific needs for those - they need to run long and not allow ads. They can't have a ton of melodic line. These things are more a vibe than they are music, and they're just enough to keep my critical brain busy and out of the way of drafting while they also provide cover for the other noises of the household.

I'm a big fan of Wordhippo.com for word finding. My rule for this is that I must open and close the browser window for every single look up. It's an attempt to keep me from sheering off of making words with rando look ups. Some days, I don't open the site at all. Other days, I may need a little mental jog or two. Those days, I need to find just the right word before I can unclench and move on.

My final favorite website while writing is a website for writing. Consider this my ongoing plug for 4theWords.com. Timed writing, gamified, stripped down to a basic text editor so I can't get too precious about how stuff looks while trying to get x amount of words before time runs out. It's a great place to fast draft and a great place to write about writing. It's a perfect venue for doing a bunch of the prework of writing - compiling research / noodling how that research impacts plot and characters, getting characters hashed out, getting GMCs worked through, etc. I'm on the site every single day.

Once I have a draft, no matter how skeletal and bloody, I shift out of websites into Word. Edits and rewrites happen with fewer website interruptions. By the time I'm in edits, I pretty much know where we're going and how we're going to get there. I no longer need to anesthetize the critical portions of my brain like I do with drafting.  Until that point, though, websites are my crutches, and I lean on 'em.

Marcella's 5 Writer's Resources

 Confession time. I haven't written anything in a year and a half. It isn't just that I haven't. I couldn't. It's like a switch flipped in my brain and NOPE is the new setting. No matter how many hours. No matter how many reworks of plot or characters. Nothing budged. Ah. I see you've noticed the past tense. It's because I fell, quite by accident, into a series of resources that are ever so slowly thawing the ice around writing. Maybe around me.

It all begins, as so many of our stories do, with January 2020 when I could see the writing on the wall and put my household on lock down a few months before official lock down started. I didn't know it at the time - what kind of damage I was taking. It was invisible. I knew that introvert me was suffering because suddenly there was no alone to be had. Not anywhere. Little did I recognize what kind of damage was being done to my mind.

My number 1 writing resource, then, is a book. 

Peak Mind by Amishi Jha - This is a nonfiction book about the science of attention. She describes how the attention systems in our brains work. Because of that, I could clearly see how and why all creative ability had been frozen. It's because my attention system has been locked on 'floodlight' - scanning for threat. Focus and concentration need a laser beam. She describes exactly how to recover. Work in progress. I can work on my book again. Finally.

Calm - Yes. It's a meditation app. It's training for focus. It's also retraining for migraine brain. But honestly, I'm here to get my writing mojo back. If several minutes a day of breathing can help my attention system relearn how to focus, count me in. Since starting the training program, I've started writing again in slow, low pressure increments every day. Building a sense of safety and success.This attaches writing to the reward system in the brain again. Blinding word counts? No. Definitely no. Those will come with time and dedicated practice.

Wordhippo - Now we're into the mundane writing resources. Wordhippo is a thesaurus that doesn't take itself too seriously. I like it because the synonyms are more on point than other resources I've used. I don't know if that's fact or perception but the pink hippo doesn't hurt anything. I find the right words more often there.

4theWords - I know I've mentioned this one before. It's a website that gamifies your word count. It works brilliantly for some people. Apparently, I'm one of them. For others, it's a complete no go. It's one of those things you have to try for yourself.

And finally, for business resources and advice, nothing beats writer organizations. Jeffe and Charissa have mentioned SFWA, I triple nominate the org. You can ask the nerdiest questions in the forums and get informed answers. It's brilliant. I'll also put in a plug for Novelists Inc. Ninc aims at indie authors and offers an incredible wealth of information up to and including drafts of rights reversion request letters.

I hope that no one other than me needs to retrain attention. It's a drag. I mean, on one hand, I finally understand what the hell happened and there's a way to fix it, but dang could I just have me back, please? If you need the resources, too, I hope they're helpful. And hey. See you in the stacks.