A Little Scattered Chaos May Be Great for Your Writing Life

on finding creative focus in three hours or less

my home office, looking less chaotic than usual

I recently listened to Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, because I always enjoy a scandalous novel with a writer as villain. These days, when I read a book by an author I like, instead of searching for the author’s website I first search for them on Substack. Whereas a website usually has an author’s books and events, an author’s Substack lets you see what they’re reading and thinking about now. It tends to be more casual, more conversational, and more recent.

I found

Rebecca F. Kuang

here and appreciated her post on “Books That Made Me a Better Writer.” I used to listen to productivity books all the time, but I’ve fallen out of the habit. One book Kuang mentioned is Deep Work by Cal Newport. After purchasing it I went down the rabbit hole and found Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, which in turn led to his blog, which led to the post The Three-or-Four Hours Rule for Getting Work Done. The central claim of the post is this:

…you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.

If you’re someone who thinks you should be accomplishing amazing things ten hours a day, Burkeman’s theory might be alarming. However, I found it quite liberating from a creative standpoint:

Just focus on protecting four hours – and don't worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos.

Scattered chaos is my jam. I start every single day planning to spend most of the hours of the day on my book in progress, and then I spend most of the hours of the day on everything else: teaching, housework, cooking, taxes, watching anything related to time travel on Netflix.

But the idea that if you spend three to four hours doing the focused work of writing, you’ve done enough, gives me hope. I can work on a book or a screenplay or an essay for three hours. When you think you have to sit down and write for a full workday, it’s extremely difficult to begin. But when you set out with the goal of writing for three hours (or even one hour), it feels much more manageable.

Easier said than done, obviously, especially if you have another job (as most of us do) and/or caregiving duties. There were many years of my life when finding three hours felt impossible; during those years, I sought out chunks of an hour or two. When my son was small and I was working as an adjunct professor at various universities and our childcare budget was tiny, my husband would go shopping at Target for an hour or two every Saturday morning, taking our young son with him. Their trips to Target (along with my son’s carseat naps at Ocean Beach, after I’d driven up and down the Great Highway until he fell asleep), allowed me to write the novel The Year of Fog, which, in a nice twist, Target then chose for its then-newish Bookmarked Book Club program, which in turn changed the trajectory of my writing career.

So my challenge to you this, week, or for the upcoming weekend, is to find an hour—or three if you’re feeling ambitious—to write. Give it your complete focus. Let your brain be there and nowhere else.

As always, happy writing!

Michelle

Do you want to get back into writing? Check out my flash fiction intensive, where you will write twelve stories in four weeks with inspiring exercises, daily readings, and plenty of practical guidance.

If you enjoy these posts, you might also enjoy my books (and it would mean the world to me if you decided to read one!) Whether you’re in the mood for a psychological thriller about a marriage cult, an atmospheric mystery about a missing child set in San Francisco, a suburban suspense story about the 1% on steroids, or a novel that imagines California on the violent brink of secession, you’ll find them here.