I wrote last week about finding time to think about your work, immerse yourself in the story. I then happened across a presentation by John Cleese on pretty much that - entitled Creativity doesn't come from your laptop. It's about ten minutes long, highly recommended.

He makes an excellent point about the problem of interruptions, and the necessity of finding a space where other people won't interrupt you. I'd like to add to that, though. I've found a lot of the time, my problem isn't that other people interrupt me, it's that I interrupt myself. Like most people in the world, I don't have a sacred place dedicated only to writing. I write where I do other things - work, pay bills, watch DVDs, browse the 'net, program, answer emails. And as I spend more time at work than I do living at home, the office that I work in when I am home quickly turns into a minefield. My old 'piling' system comes to the fore, and the various piles of paperwork threaten to eat me whenever I walk into the room.

So I sit down to write, and I can see the creditcard bill that needs paying, the emails that need answering, the work that needs doing, the DVD that needs watching (well, it doesn't need it, but it counts as 'research', right?). Long before anyone comes to ask me anything, I've well and truly distracted myself from writing.

I can't just hide these things away all the time, however - that way lies defaulting payments and very unhappy employers. So there needs to be a system to hide from the rest of your life, just for a little while.

Some people manage this by writing only on a laptop - they take a laptop to some rarely-used corner of the house, and sit writing away from anything they'd interrupt themselvse with. Others take a notebook and pen, instead, and go longhand. Personally, neither works well for me; that tiny amount of extra effort - getting out my laptop and finding somewhere comfortable to write - ensures I'll never do it, and the fact that I truly loath transcribing from longhand keeps my notebooks for brief plans and ideas only.

I've briefly considered a drop-cloth to cover the rest of my desk, hiding from sight all the other things I could/should/would be doing, but I'm concerned I'd forget to remove it again.

Perhaps I need to rework my 'piling' system, or my office altogether. But 'making space to write' isn't just a matter of finding somewhere for the giant corkboard, it's finding a way to hide the rest of your life for a while. Because there will always be something that seems more important when you should be writing, but all those more-important things add up to not writing at all.