Reading time: About 3 minutes
There are lots of excuses but no good reasons. You need to learn how to write when you’re being interrupted…
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A reader wrote to me last week in despair. She works from home, has two kids and a dog and shares an office with her husband. “I can’t get more than 10 minutes of writing done before someone needs me,” she said. “How am I supposed to finish a book like this?”
I hear some version of this complaint nearly every week. And I experienced it myself when I started my own writing business when my triplets were toddlers. (I was desperate for a chance to speak with other adults, okay?)
So, here’s what I told my reader and what I’ll tell you: the interruptions are not the real problem. The real problem is what you believe about writing time.
The myth of the uninterrupted stretch
Many writers carry a fantasy. In it, they have a whole free morning, a tidy desk, a cup of tea going cold beside them and not a single soul to bother them for three glorious hours.
They wait for that morning. And they wait. And they fail to write the book.
The fantasy is a trap. It tells you that real writing happens only in long, protected blocks, which means you can let yourself off the hook every single day that doesn’t deliver one. That’s most days. That’s nearly all days, for nearly everyone.
You don’t need the uninterrupted morning. You need a different relationship with the time you actually have.
Write in the gaps
I tell my clients to aim for 15 minutes of focused writing a day. Some of them have to start with five. And those small windows turn out to be remarkably interruption-proof because almost nobody is going to bother you for the length of a single song.
When you stop chasing the three-hour block and start using the 15-minute gap, the interruption loses its sting. So what if the dog needs out after 16 minutes? You’ve already finished your writing. The interruption arrived after the work, not in the middle of it.
This is the part people miss. A brief session isn’t a sad consolation prize for the busy. It’s often the better way to write, full stop. Your brain stays fresh. You quit before the well runs dry. You come back tomorrow wanting more.
Lower the cost of stopping and starting
The thing that makes being interrupted so painful isn’t really the interruption. It’s the cost of getting back in.
You know the feeling. You’re deep in a paragraph, someone asks where the scissors are, and suddenly the thread is gone. You spend the next 10 minutes trying to find your way back to where you were.
But you can shrink that cost. When you have to stop, leave yourself a breadcrumb. Write a messy half-sentence about what comes next. Jot a note in the margin: “Make this part about her mother.” Stop mid-thought on purpose, while you still know exactly what you meant to say. A finished paragraph is a cold trail. An unfinished one pulls you straight back in.
John Steinbeck had his own version of this. He told writers to forget the book as a whole and write just one page for the next day, so the work never felt too big to pick back up.
Now, about stopping the interruptions
Some interruptions, you can’t prevent. A sick kid is a sick kid. An injured dog needs a vet. A broken-down car, a mechanic. But many interruptions are softer than they look, and they yield to a bit of structure.
Tell the people you live with when you’re writing and what you need from them. Be specific. “I’m writing from 8 to 8:15, so unless there’s blood, it can wait,” works far better than a vague hope that they’ll read your mind. People aren’t trying to derail you. They simply don’t know the rules because you’ve never said them out loud.
Put your phone in another room. Not face-down on the desk. Another room. The single most reliable interrupter in your life is the device you carry voluntarily, and it answers to you alone.
Close the email tab. Close the browser. If you write on the same machine you use for everything else, the call is coming from inside the house.
And consider claiming a worse time that nobody wants. The interruptions that plague your mid-morning often vanish at 6 a.m. or 10 p.m. I do my best writing before 7 a.m., partly because the world hasn’t woken up enough to need me yet.
What this actually buys you
Here’s the math I come back to again and again. One decent page a day, written in a stolen 15 minutes, gives you a 365-page book in a year. Waiting for the perfect uninterrupted afternoon gives you nothing, because that afternoon never comes.
The goal is never to eliminate the interruptions. The goal is to make your writing so portable, so quick to enter and exit, that the interruptions stop mattering. You want a practice that fits in the cracks of an ordinary, noisy, demanding life. Because that’s the only kind of life most of us have.
Protect the 15 minutes. Leave yourself a breadcrumb. Tell people the rules. Then write, knowing the dog can wait.
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Do you know how to write when you’re being interrupted? We can all learn from each other, so please, share your thoughts with my readers and me in the comments section, below. If you comment on today’s post (or any others) by July 31/26, I’ll put you in a draw for a digital copy of my first book, 8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. To enter, please scroll down to the comments, directly underneath the related posts links, below. You don’t have to join Disqus to post! Read my tutorial to learn how to post as a guest. (It’s easy!)
