Pylimitics

Writers have to deal with interruptions. I think that’s universal — among writers, at least. It’s pretty common to read that a writer has a garden shed, or a private nook, or an attic, or some private place. A writer’s environment shapes their work, for sure, but the immediate environment can also sometimes function as a filter to reduce interruptions and distractions.

When I’m writing, and I’m interrupted, I can feel the mental structure I’ve constructed in my essay or story or manual or blog post tremble and collapse. It took long minutes to create it, and I know it’s going to take more to put it back together. Although not as long as it took the first time. After all, I was writing. I have notes.

I’ve spent years living with other people and pets while working in a home office that also serves other uses. The printers are in here, and lately it has also become home to a vast collection of dog toys and arts and crafts supplies for grandchildren. Only the cat keeps nothing in here. I think that’s because the cat has made it quite clear that he is Not My Cat and what am I doing hanging around here anyway.

I’m extremely familiar with interruptions. I don’t really think opening my laptop or picking up a pen or just sitting down at my desk are trigger events, but I have scoured to place to find any hidden cameras. The dogs do not seem to need cameras. Their superhuman senses are perfectly attuned to the creak of my chair and the muted sounds of my non-mechanical keyboard, no matter how delicately I try to press the keys. I suspect the ink in the pens exudes an unmistakable aroma that wafts outward as soon as the cap is off.

Any and all of those signs (I nearly said “omens”) can lead to various requests coming my way. The requests themselves serve as interruptions even before I inevitably get up to fulfill them. A request may be uttered from another room entirely, and projected with the energy of a Shakespearean actor from before the age of the microphone. Once again the dogs are the exceptions; they simply arrive all at once, in a rush, carrying their urgent requests.

Let me interrupt my train of thought right here to say something about dogs. You read about dogs patiently awaiting this or that. A beloved owner returning after years. Or after work. It’s nonsense. Dogs have no patience. They view us humans as not only irritatingly slow at everything, but utterly devoid of common sense thanks to our noses residing at a ridiculously altitude; much too far from the action. When a dog wants to go out or to get a chewy treat, immediately is a little too slow. Now, what was I saying?

Through some unknown process of synchronicity, all the needs, requests, wants, and urgent queries addressed to me seem to occur, not simultaneously with my commencing upon a paragraph, but somehow about half-way through. This is the case regardless of whether I’m writing an essay in an academic genre where my paragraphs are endless labyrinths of esoteric and specialized jargon, or tossing off a blog post in the current AI-enthusiast style of one sentence per.

I suspect this phenomenon might tell us something profound about time, quantum effects, and the attention spans of dogs, but funding for the sciences in the US has dried up and although I began a grant request, I only got a short way into it before I had to fetch a water glass that was out of reach, retrieve a printout, apply a band-aid, and then mop up the floor that was suddenly and inexplicably puddled.

But never mind all that; I was talking about interruptions and how I’ve developed ways to cope with them. The first thing I do, when I start writing something, is to write what it is I’m going to write about. That’s assuming I have some idea, which is not always the case. Nevertheless, if I don’t have a specific topic, I make one up. Even if it’s not what I end up doing, at least when I return I have an alternative I could start over with.

The practice of writing has been around for so many millennia that it has a lot of standards and expectations, and you may recognize that idea of having, at the top of the page, a brief message about what is going to fill the rest of it. This idea is not original with me; the thing is sometimes called a “title.” Good idea, wherever it came from.

It’s when I return from locating the milk bones and helping with the scissors and white glue that my second coping strategy comes into play: reading. I simply read what I started writing. Sometimes it makes enough sense for me to continue. This is especially true when I’ve had the presence of mind to use some clichés like “thirdly…” or even better “and in conclusion…” Clichés can be labor-saving devices, after all, and they don’t get the respect they deserve.

Thirdly…well, I’ll have to come back to finish this; somebody is at the door.