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.
The legend engraved on the face of the Jewish nickel- on the body of every Jewish child!- not IN GOD WE TRUST, but SOMEDAY YOU'LL BE A PARENT AND YOU'LL KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE.
I just sit there and make up songs and sing to [my son] in gibberish. I'm very good at gibberish now.
If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called 'It Takes a Village.' And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, 'What the heck do you mean by that?' This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.
Working moms commonly testify that they feel guilty when they are away from their children and guilty when they are not at their jobs. Devoted fathers certainly miss their children deeply, but it does not seem to be with the same gnawing, primal anxiety that often afflicts women.
The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.
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