Keeping Focus

[Poseptune]

If I knew the answer to the following problem I would have written an article for the Guide, but since I have the problem I am opening this thread to see what the community has to say about it.

So I open with a simple question:
How do you stay focused on something long enough to develop it?

My thoughts are all over the place when I'm in development mode. I start on one section of what ever I'm working on be it a nation, a city, a class, etc... I will always get an idea for something else. I open a new page of the document just to jot the idea down, but I tend to stay on it, jotting down more ideas as they come to me, fleshing the idea out more than I intended. What ever I was working on previous to this new idea suffers. I break my train of thought and have difficulties coming back to it. So it goes to the way side and I begin something else.

Comments* on my setting haven't helped the matter either. Some do as I hope and inspire me to jot down a few ideas as well as pointed out areas that I can improve, but the comments lately have been pulling me in different directions (elves, rivers, topographical maps, the new worlds). They've enhanced my inability to focus.

I want to work on it all at once. I know I can't do that, but I can't seem to focus on one single idea. My frontier submission was my finally straw. I couldn't stay focused on one element of it long enough to get more than just a rough paragraph out before jumping to something else (when I had time to work on it). I loathe the way it came out. I only submitted it because I promised I would. (I wasn't the one who voted for it.)

I've gotten to the point that I don't want to work on my setting anymore because I can't get anything completed. (Ish, if you read this it wasn't the contest that made me feel this way. I've been putting off working on my setting for some time now, that's why there have been few significant updates to it. I entered the contest thinking that since I only had to work on one thing, I would be able to focus on that and get a good entry out.)


* I'm not saying I don't appreciate the comments and questions, I do.

[Lmns Crn]

I keep a little black idea notebook, and a lot of patience. That's the trick that works for me.

My ideas usually come scattered and a little random, but I think about them for a long, long time. My very loosely organized black book is full of one-word and half-sentence entries, which I mull over later. Many of these entries are things that occur to me when I'm trying to go to sleep, so I get up, turn on the light, find a pen, and write them down.

I look back through the book now and then, receiving the messages I write to myself. Something will catch my eye, and I'll add to it, or turn it into a more polished concept and post it here. But it happens slowly-- all the random little impulses add up over multiple years, so the excited inspirations do eventually pay off.

To really focus yourself, try getting out a pencil and a sheet of paper. Make a little chart, make a graphic organizer, reminding yourself which things need to be fleshed out (and more importantly, which ideas are most central, most vital.) Since you bring up the frontier contest, I will, too: I did a great deal of pencil and paper work for that, just to make sure I had covered all the bases I wanted to. The graphic organizer works like a checklist; I wouldn't let myself submit the entry until I had filled all the spaces I had determined to fill. I've been doing similar things for my long posts in the "House of Death" thread, and writing those long posts in one or two nights each. The material there isn't new, though; it comes from years of accumulation in my black notebook.

I tend to start my ideas on paper and eventually move them to computers to add detail and length. Starting them on the computer is too intimidating for me; the blank new document feels like too vast an expanse to fill, and there's no "anchor" keeping me on topic.

[Hibou]

I have always had a habit of getting most of my ideas (anything from cool-sounding names for people and places to organizations, legends' personalities, and terrain thoughts) at work, and I tend to work jobs where you don't have time to write something down, so I tend to lose them. I know exactly what you mean, though. I want to work on all sorts of stuff in my setting at once (currently trying to rewrite my prologue and first few chapters to my major story most, though), and as much as I love my settings and stories, sometimes they just get boring.

However, I do have some advice for you: perhaps you could take your setting down a different path, and try something new with it. It's what I've been doing whenever I was really stumped on what to write next or felt I had really taken the setting down a dead-end road (it's what happened to Sleep and Golden Age). An apocalyptic-style event or events is a good way to change the way your world functions. Maybe something happens and the majority of the world becomes enveloped in a blanket of particularly vile atmospheric dust that blocks out sunlight in most places, and the only areas that still receive sunlight on the normal day/night cycle are small pockets that people suddenly flock to. The remainder of the world is left constantly dark, but somehow some plant life manages to survive or take new forms, and the dark places are resettled - by something nasty. That's just one idea though, and one level that you could change things on. Whatever you do, though, make sure it's something that really excites you and makes you feel as though your setting is someone else's and you're just begging to explore the next part of it.

[Numinous]

The way I work on worlds is to talk.  I call a friend, and then talk his ear off about all my ideas for a world.  By the time I have to stop and breathe, new ideas have surfaced and old ones have been expanded on.  The narrative makes my worlds live more than anything else, it might be something you could try.

Also, keep a notebook like LC suggested, it's helped me immensely.

[Tybalt]

It is very tempting to want to do all possible things, I agree. However focus intensifies things. I was tempted earlier in my New Edom campaign to branch things out, encourage my pcs to explore the world at lot more. However intensifying the war has made it possible for them to genuinely want to win it, loathe their enemies and focus on ways to beat them. Tempting as it is to want to have things wander far afield I've found myself detailing the New Edom setting in particular till the players are gradually coming to know most of the towns and even villages. What I do to keep on this is to remind myself of how rewarding it is.

[LordVreeg]

I use the CBG as my creative springboard/organizer.

Really.  

I know you say it's making things worse, but I advsie doing what Tybalt has been doing, and some of the other members.  Start a thread about that specific thing you want to discuss/work on.  Like this thread you opened about staying focused, and everything on it is about staying focused.  Some of my new documentation and character creation stuff has started by cutting and pasting from thread entries.  I take the pasts and expand on them.

[Ishmayl-Retired]

Honestly, I think this subject actually would make for a great Guide article... anyone here think they could handle something like this?