Thread by @mattgemmell

A brief thread about the grim reality of writing fiction, and how you can make your iPad help you with focus (and avoiding procrastination). 👇

First, good news: creativity is a skill that can be practised and cultivated. You don’t need to rely on mysterious inspiration striking. You can pretty much train your brain to produce on a schedule. That’s great!

The bad news is that you, yourself, will stand in your own way.

If you’re like me — and my solipsism and egocentrism conveniently confirm that you are — then you’ll procrastinate. You’ll get distracted. Distractions are so damned good. Garbage on youtube. Nonsense on this hellsite. Your stupid neighbours out the window. So enticing.

The crap thing about writing (the job) is that the bulk of it is composed of actually writing (the physical act). It’s a sorry state of affairs, but there you have it. So your only significant challenge is making yourself do it.

Furthermore, since you’re a filthy procrastinator who would much, MUCH rather watch woodworking videos or reaction compilations for the Metroid Prime 4 pre-announcement (bless those excited fools), your real task is essentially to make indolence harder for yourself.

Now that you’ve looked up indolence, I’ll continue. Writing depends largely on giving your brain nothing else to do. Certainly nothing more interesting to do! Writing needs you to become really familiar with that scrape on the wall above your desk. To become mesmerised by it.

If your brain has no recourse to anything more immediately interesting, it will absolutely start to make stuff up. Daydreams, arguments you might have with your mother, how ultra good Metroid Prime 4 will be, and so on. Making stuff up is our goal! And boredom is our means.

Writing is where your brain takes you away from your surroundings because they’re just so depressing and boring. Technology, usually a force for depressing us via _interest_ rather than boredom, can however also help here. The basic steps are obvious.

I’m talking from an iOS/iPadOS perspective, because that’s what I use. If you use something else, well then you’re not part of the rapt and grateful audience I’m picturing in my mind, so just… begone.

First, switch off all notifications. Activate Do Not Disturb. Maybe forever.

But the real secret weapon is a thing you probably haven’t even noticed, on account of you (probably) not being blind, or deaf, or autistic, or whatever. iOS has an accessibility feature that can make your device The Most Boring Thing Ever, and it’s called Guided Access.

It’s in the Settings app, in the Accessibility panel. It’s called… Guided Access, as I said. It’s near the bottom. You should switch it on in there, which just makes it available; it’s not activated immediately. We’ll get to that. Also choose a passcode, but leave Face ID _OFF_.

The reason for the passcode is to make it harder for you to disabled Guided Access without having at least a few moments of crippling guilt (another great tool for writers!). The reason to leave Face ID off (just for Guided Access) is because that makes it too easy to disable.

The way it works is this: you open your preferred writing app, which is assuredly @ulyssesapp. Or whatever, man. Then you triple-press the physical Power button on your device. That’ll show the Accessibility menu (make sure that’s enabled too, in Settings app).

Then you choose Guided Access from that menu, and boom: you are now LOCKED INTO THAT ONE APP (the one that was frontmost when you switched on Guided Access). No dock. No app-switcher. No notification centre. All gone. Your fingers can no longer betray you when bored.

To get out of it after starting at your wall-scrape for 45 minutes, you just once again triple-press the Power button and choose End Guided Access, then enter the passcode you chose (it’s not your general device passcode, unless you used the same one).

I find that about 95% of my destructive procrastination is swallowed by Guided Access. My brain will cmd-tab to Twitter before I even know it, but not now! Cmd-tab doesn’t work anymore! My brain will cmd-space and Spotlight “youtube” in 1.5 seconds. Joke’s on you, stupid brain!

I hope this has been useful to you, and that it’ll help you write more, and that the process will be _at least_ as painful for you as it is for me. I hope that last part most of all.

Thanks for reading, and here’s a picture of the aforementioned wall-scrape to inspire you.

If you liked this, and as proof that it works, please sign up for my entirely free mini-stories, each Monday in your inbox! mattgemmell.com/once-upon-a-ti… 👍