How do you stay focused during a pandemic, or otherwise?

May 2020 Question of the Month: How do you stay focused during a pandemic, or otherwise?

Jess Lourey

I’ve got a four-step process:

1. I grieve the loss of what I think focus should look like. I do this at the beginning of every book (I’m working on my 21st), and the practice is serving me well these days. It takes me about two weeks to stop fighting the belief that this work should be easier. This is a lesson I never learn.
2. Next, I start a daily meditation practice. (Fifteen minutes is good.)
3. Once grounded, I outline the whole project, a couple sentences per scene. This provides an anchor and a guide without infringing on my creativity.
4. Finally, I write in small bursts, or, if I can’t even manage that, I dictate a scene a day.

Jess Lourey is the Amazon Charts bestselling author of Unspeakable Things. An Agatha, Anthony, and Lefty Award nominee, Jess is a tenured professor of creative writing and sociology and a leader of writing retreats.

Marcie Rendon

‘Get up, get dressed, and do your best’ is a motto I live by. Each day is a gift and an opportunity to have fun, create, and/or do something good. In this pandemic, as an author, I have found myself writing more humor. I have had fun re-creating famous paintings with objects we find around the house and posting them online. A granddaughter and I are making masks for a friend who is a respiratory therapist at two area hospitals. There is joy in creating beautiful masks for those on the front lines. As a Native American woman, I treasure my resilience that is borne against years of historical grief.

Marcie Rendon, citizen of the White Earth Nation, is the author of Girl Gone Missing, the second in the Cash Blackbear series and nominated for the G.P. Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award, 2020, and Murder on the Red River, winner of the Pinckley Women’s Debut Crime Novel Award and the Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist.