It used to be enough just to sit down.

At least, that's what I gathered from my English teachers who gave me writerly advice back during my intellectual incipience. That's what I got from reading books written about writing that were as much beautiful works of creative nonfiction as they were how-to guides. That's what I heard in every anecdote from every older writer who "made it", who figured out how to hone their craft enough to actually do what so many of us flail around doing. 

You just sit down at your keyboard and go.

And it used to work. Back in the golden age of typewriters and primitive word processors, that was indeed what you needed. To be physically rooted to your writing machine would help prevent distractions, would aid you in your focus in a very basic way. Procrastination meant getting up, going to the kitchen, going to the window, prodding the cat. Procrastination was engaging in a world outside of the page. As long as you could constrain yourself to the chair, you'd stay in the work. 

Not that it was always easy. One of my favorite English teachers mentioned a writer--a famous one whose name has left me--who needed to tie himself to his chair every morning. Literally tie himself down with rope. Otherwise, he'd get up, wander, prolong, do anything but write. People capable of purely mental work are also prone to fits of distraction. It's just how writers are wired. But chaining yourself down--sometimes literally--used to do the trick. 

Until my generation. We're the ones who ruined everything. We're the ones who turned the writing machine into a window all its own. And not even a window to the outdoors which we can ponder in an aloof and writerly fashion. It's a window to a world bigger and more immediate than any other glass division. We have all the information, all the distraction in the world embedded in the very machine that allows us to write our words. It's not enough to force ourselves to sit anymore. The world in the chair is bigger than the world outside of it. 

So what do we do? Physical restraints are useless now. It's not a physical issue. Our challenge is purely in the mind. Our focus depends on how well we control ourselves within a single plane--the one on our computer monitor. What do our ropes look like now? 

Well, they're far more subtle and far easier to slip out of. But right now mine are taking the form of Judas Priest's album Painkiller. Before that I was listening to some more melancholy nonsense--the music I felt like listening to and the music that kept me wandering out in the digital void. I had to take something I didn't feel like doing--putting on some '90s metal--and force myself to do it. And it broke my distraction, narrowed me down to a place where I could actually string words into coherence. In the end, the act is the same. When writers tied themselves to chairs, they were placing themselves against their mood. When I put on Priest or close that browser tab or put my phone two rooms away, I'm carving away at my will. In either case, you're creating a place where your whims are denied. It helps to have an anchor--some music that puts you in a specific mood, maybe a certain light, a certain posture or chair. It's still a matter of chaining yourself to focus. The difference now is that we need to forge our own chains.