Make sure your family and loved ones don’t interrupt you during your_x000D_ writing time. If you’re a lawyer or doctor, friends don’t just stop by the office to chat or interrupt you from your work. But for some reason, people think writing is different. It isn’t, and you need to make clear that this is sacred time.
Interpretation
Writing, like any profession, requires undisturbed time to be productive and should be respected as such.
In this quote, Douglas Preston emphasizes the importance of protecting one's writing time from interruptions, akin to how professions like law or medicine are respected. He argues that writing is a serious endeavor deserving of the same level of respect and focus, highlighting the need for boundaries to foster creativity and productivity.
In practice
In a writing workshop, I shared a quote by Douglas Preston to stress the importance of focused writing time.
A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea.
My family has been poor and working-class for generations. And we live - I live in this really small community in Southern Mississippi where you don't evacuate, and you have never evacuated because there are too many people in your family to evacuate.
But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.
Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.
Our kids are reflections of us. How we interact with others, even in a hostile situation... how we respond and our children see that is how they are going to respond.
Good parents give their children Roots and Wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what's been taught them.
We cannot control what others choose to do, and so we cannot force our children to heaven, but we can determine what we will do. And we can decide that we will do all we can to bring down the powers of heaven into that family we want so much to have forever.
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