Fueling Fiction With Gossip

A bit of frivolity that I’ve recently found to help my writing: stopping now and then to glance at one of my favorite gossip blogs.

Lately while working on revisions on my novel, I’ve found myself fairly frequently taking five-minute breaks to look at Jossip or Gawker, two of my vices.

On the face of it, this seems like a stupid thing to do. But the kind of revising I’m doing is tackling one small knotty problem after another. And about every third one, I hit a wall. So I indulge in a few minutes of gossip. And often I’ve come back to my novel with a new perspective on what I’m writing. In a few instances, a good specific usable idea has come to me while I indulged in media-celebrity gossip.

I’d been allowing myself to do this recently with good results. And then by chance, while looking for an endorsable link on procrastination, I found and linked to a site yesterday that makes a pitch for this kind of small break. I’m not the only one to find that it works. So here’s the link again on what’s billed here as “work avoidance behavior,” even though it’s not.

BTW, it’s not gossip websites I’m necessarily promoting, instead the fact that small seemingly self-indulgent and procrastinatory breaks can be very productive.

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Categories: creativity, problem-solving, procrastination, strategy