Disconnect and Feel Your Creativity

In today’s A to Z challenge, “D” is for Disconnect.

Writers are involved in social networking, including this blog challenge, to gain connections. We uphold the concept of connectedness to improve our lives. We anticipate networking will help us gain more knowledge, send our own messages to a larger audience, reach or validate our personal goals.

We may reach some or all of those goals, but also very likely we will gain increased stress and demands on our limited time.

For writers, stress and more work equate to less creativity. 

Unfortunately, most of us at one point fear taking time to disconnect from our continual stream of networking. We fear we will: miss out on the next big idea; be left out; become unpopular; not discover a great path to get our writing to readers; not build a large enough platform to suit a potential publisher/agent; not sell our books. We each hear these voices chasing us back onto the treadmill. 

We lose valuable time maintaining our connections on social media sites. But, much more importantly, in the time leftover, our brains do not immediately let go and relax into free-flowing creative thought. So while our primary love is channeling imagination to paper, networking, intended to let our creative voices sing, can easily over-stimulate and destroy our art.

I’ve been guilty. I found myself with time to write, a great outline in front of me I was excited about, but couldn’t connect one idea to the next with any three-dimensional style. Not writer’s block…more like writer’s inertia or writer's barricade, which I couldn’t hurdle until I disconnected.

Where did I write this post? Scribbled longhand at the beach. No internet at all. Only a cell phone in case my elderly mother had an emergency. I wrote page after page and visualized dozens of amazing plot developments. 

Sand brushes off my notebook much easier than my mind relaxes after a run on the networking treadmill.

(On Thursday, I’ll post some pictures of the beach I'm at—Fort DeSoto for “F” day.)

Disconnect. How do you do it? Or how should you do it?