Staying Focused: What to Do When Your Mind Wanders

An Explosion of Ideas

Imagine the following scenario: you’re writing a scene, let’s say, a dialogue between one of your main characters and a merchant. Suddenly, the backstory of that secondary or tertiary character starts taking shape in your mind. What brought them to this place? Why did they decide to open that business? What did they do in their younger years? Soon enough, that character has a fully developed life, complete with a family tree spanning ten generations and countless adventures to explore and write down.

And an overwhelming urge to write all of that consumes you.

I’ve lived through this situation dozens of times. The roots of possibility stretch out across such a fertile ground as the fantasy genre, where, quite literally, the only limit is your imagination. But there’s one small detail we sometimes overlook: we’re writing a specific story. In particular, the story of these characters we’ve already invested countless hours in. We can’t just abandon everything for this new obsession we’ve become addicted to in the past thirty seconds.

Or can we?

The Easy Part: Getting Distracted

Faced with this situation, what do we do? I’ve spoken to authors of all kinds, and in every conversation, the most common profile of those who experience this belongs to the same genre: fantasy.

“I’m juggling several stories at once,” one girl once told me. “I’ve created ten worlds, each with millennia of history and several independent magic systems,” another one said. I find this fascinating because they can also describe in detail the ideas they plan to develop and the variety of elements at play. But when I asked them, “How many novels have you finished?” the answer was always the same: none.

With sadness, they explained that the main reason lay in the mental scatter that struck them as they wrote. They were aware that, among hundreds of reasons, this was the biggest reason they never managed to finish the first step toward publishing. And I could only nod, understanding the situation from my own experience.

The hundreds or thousands of ideas we have at any given moment overwhelm our attention span, and staying focused on continuing the story we’re currently writing becomes an odyssey worthy of Odysseus himself. Because it wraps around us and takes over. Our body starts itching, and it doesn’t stop until we set aside the current manuscript, open a new document, and start the new story begging to wreck our nerves.

It happened to me too, at first. I still have those typewritten manuscripts (yes, I’m that old). One after another, in different genres, with characters copied from other stories, I’d change their names and eye colours, and they were mine. All unfinished.

I was twelve.

In the digital age, I also have several manuscript documents in various stages of development and in different genres: war stories, adventure, horror, mystery, crime, and fantasy, both high and urban. Some with only a single chapter. Others half written.

The Hard Part: Staying Focused

When I decided to take writing and publishing seriously, I had to make a huge effort to break that habit. But it was impossible because the saga I’m writing, The Disappearance of the Gnomes, is a fantasy world that must be built. Handcrafted grain by grain, stone by stone, character by character. So even when describing the main characters, I already had stories imagined for them, their parents, their friends, even their pets.

I grew frustrated because I wanted to break that bad habit, until I realised there was nothing to break. My brain simply works this way; it’s easily distracted. I had to retrain it. Learn to validate that this ease of distraction is not a disadvantage but an investment. These are ideas that may bear fruit someday, but for now, we need to focus on the task at hand: finishing this story.

The solution? In my case, Post-its. Dozens of these little notes stuck all over my office wall.

It was a relief because my brain felt reassured knowing that the idea it had created and felt proud of was safely written somewhere, with my promise that we would revisit it in the future.

That allowed me to channel all my efforts into finishing my first novel: The Twin Moons, the first volume of the saga I mentioned, The Disappearance of the Gnomes. The hardest and most complex task I’ve ever embarked on. You don’t know how hard writing a book is until you finish one.

But a new problem arose: soon, the yellow squares flooded not just the office wall, but also the desk, the door, the windows, and even a few in the kitchen and living room.

Find Your Focusing Tool

I had to look for digital alternatives. I tried several: kanban boards, documents attached to the manuscript, margin notes, and a few others I can’t even remember now. But I stopped to think for a moment.

I’m creating Ar’Endria, a world with thousands of years of history, characters, events, and more. I’m very prone to expanding any character or situation that isn’t part of the main story. What suits my particular situation is something wiki-like. A place I can revisit when that storm of ideas strikes or when I have a moment of peace to expand the lore. But creating a wiki is boring. And that’s another thing I need. Something dynamic, something that gives me a spark and lets me see almost immediately how everything is connected.

I found Obsidian.

They’re not sponsoring this post, but I’ll say it anyway: it’s a lifesaver. Since I’ve been using it, my focus has improved greatly; I don’t get distracted as easily, and when I do (because it’s inevitable), it still benefits me because the world I’m creating grows.

This has allowed me to finish four works in a year: two pieces of fanfiction (one for Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and another for the video game Warframe), one horror story, and one romance in my own style (disclaimer: I don’t like romance novels). The longest, by far, is The Twin Moons, but even though the others are considerably shorter and less deep (because they don’t require as much preparation), they’re still an achievement because they help me develop my skills as a writer. Skills that are proving immensely useful now that I’m immersed in the second volume of The Disappearance of the Gnomes: The World Stone.

I accept and understand that not everyone works the same way and what works for me may not work for someone else, but here is my method. If it helps someone, I’ll be happy to have been of use.

If you’d like to explore the books I mention here, feel free to visit the writings section of my website.