Joel Martinez' Tumbler

For me, it seems like writing is a vehicle with a high mass. It takes a while for me to get it going … staring at the screen for a while with my brain continuously telling me to check twitter, or reddit, or hacker news, or youtube, or facebook, or gmail, or twitter, or reddit, or hacker news, ad nauseam. It seems that as hard as the process of writing is to get moving, my brain is equally as difficult to get to stop moving in different directions.

Sometimes, making myself (or, let’s be truthful, having someone else make) a hot cup of coffee helps. But then sometimes I find myself picking the cup up, taking a sip, putting the cup down, then Getting To Work. Then as I think of what to write next, I’ll pick up the cup, take a sip, put the coffee down, and tell myself it’s time to Get To Work. This cycle continues until the coffee is gone, at which point the first cycle resumes.

Sometimes, putting on my headphones can get the process started. But then sometimes I’ll find myself playing desk drums to some great tune that came on and realize that I haven’t written a word in the last five minutes. Then I check twitter.

Sometimes, I get out a good ol’ piece of paper and pencil and start writing down what I’m working on. By making a consolidated list, I can break down whatever it is that I want to get down on paper and get the brain moving in the direction of doing some actual work. But then sometimes I start doodling, and decide to make a crappy painting of a spaceship

And then sometimes, I find myself blocked, and decide to write a blog post about it. Man, wouldn’t it be cool if I could put a picture of that spaceship I drew on the tablet on the blog post? Then I gotta figure out how to transfer the file to my desktop where I’m writing the blog post and … well here we are.

I just checked twitter again :-/

So how do you do it?