I read the last chapter/segment I wrote and edit everything that catches my eye. (But not trying to make it perfect.) That puts me in the zone of "I'm writing, I'm doing it, there's no stopping now". When I finish reading and tweaking I'm glad to start writing something new. Unlike mentioned above, sometimes I need to stop my writing session at the end of a chapter. So I can take a deep breath and focus on the next chapter between writing sessions. It works better for me that way.
I'm still trying to figure out how to focus on writing. I usually get out a chapter from my first draft every day (except on the days when I work my part-time job), but they can be very bare bones sometimes. I have a lot of ideas, but I find it hard to put them into words, and to make it enough to fill out a chapter.
A chapter strikes me as a fairly artificial unit of writing. If it works for you, ignore me totally. But maybe try writing at the scene level instead?
Focus? Start my writing day? What does this mean? In all seriousness- yeah this is currently my big thing I'm working on figuring out. I have self-diagnosed myself with ADHD (mostly the inattentive kind) but! I do have an appointment to get it confirmed. @Night Herald You said a thing about music and I may try to do this more, its sounding like something that might help me.
Music! It varies from piece to piece, but my current project is all about high-energy bebop: Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, etc. If I start writing because I had something I was dying to get down, but forget to tell Alexa to play me an album, my momentum wains as soon as I've gotten out that paragraph or two. Starting cold without some Mingus has become extremely difficult too. Music activates memory and emotion better than almost any other stimulus. You've heard of "state dependent memory?" It's the principle in psychology that states something to the effect that you're more likely to recall information you learned if your mind is in the same state as it was when you learned it. This is most often sited in reference to things like narcotics and alcohol. If you study stoned, take the test stoned. Obviously that's not the best recipe for success for most people, but whatever state you were in before is the best for repeating the process as rote later. This is just as true when trying to jump back in on a project. It's infinitely easier to continue where you left off if you feel the same as you did before. When I was in my twenties, I thought I could only write drunk. I now know that was ridiculous. Routine and consistency in environment are just as effective and come with fewer inherent problems. I read a swath of articles and interviews culling every bit of advice I could find from professional, published authors. Music as an essential writing tool was mentioned frequently, and if you need a good place to start, the most often used by these authors was by far The Beatles. I sympathize with your distraction and procrastination issues. I am the undisputed king of tangents. I can find hours worth of distraction in a stray length of thread, so imagine me on a computer. I currently have seven tabs open in Firefox and eleven windows underneath. It's only eleven o'clock. When I sit down to write though, that's what I do. I let myself jump around when I need to though. If I try to concentrate too hard for too long, I loose all forward progress. It's an ADD thing. Getting lost on Wikipedia for ten minutes is as good as getting up and stretching, just so long as I come back, and again, momentum created by routine and environment is a big help in bringing me back to task. Lastly, and this probably wouldn't work for everyone, but it's absolutely worth trying: I used to do little writing exercises before I tackled my project for the day. I'd write three haikus or start a timer for five minutes and write stream of consciousness nonsense until the alarm went off. It sounds ridiculous, but pick any exercise a high school English teacher might give you. It's like warming up before a workout. The end product can be, and often is, hilariously bad. It doesn't matter though. It's just an exercise. You might be surprised how much easier the words come after priming the part of your brain that writes. In the end though, you have to follow the old cliche: Just write! Another thing I learned from all those writers talking about their processes is that the beginning of a novel especially, but also the first few paragraphs of a chapter or scene are often the worst prose in the entire first draft. You just have to get something, anything on the page to get going. Edit later. Finally following this advice after ignoring it for years has helped me immensely of late.
Sorry. I know I already went on way too long (editing for length in the second draft of my book is going to be a bitch!), but I wanted to add that the whole "just write" adage is especially important when, like me, you usually find your first paragraph of a session cringe-worthy when compared to what you wrote when you were really in the zone last time. Apparently most writers feel that way. You just have to push through it. It's been working for me, anyway, and it was encouraging to know that even Stephen "I write 2000 words a day even on Christmas" King complains of this same phenomenon.
Part of my goal for the Highly Flavored thing was for writing to be sufficiently enjoyable that it would compete with time-wasting activities. So most of my scenes are written sitting on the couch puttering on my laptop while the TV is on. Glueing them together and solving problems requires more focused attention—problems are often solved while digging beds in the garden and discussing the problem in my head with Columbo. When I have an idea I drop the shovel/fork/broadfork and run to the garden rocker to type a skeletal scene or set of notes into my phone.
It's all about self-discipline. Writing is a job like any other. You show up on time and you get to work and you don't stop until you've accomplished something. It helps if you have things in your head that you just have to get out, it stops being a chore and starts being a necessity.
Unless you have a very specific format or plan for your book, DO NOT write your first draft by chapter. Write the narrative first; get the story down. During editing you can figure out how to organize your story into chapters.
Anyone who is self-employed knows that it doesn't matter if you want to work, you have to work. At the end of the day, your job as a writer is producing words. If you can't produce words, if you are not disciplined enough to produce words, then you're not a writer. You're unemployed.
Or, you know, alternatively, you have a whole other job besides writing, and there's no relation between number of words written and the amount of bread on the table, and you can produce those words whenever you damned well please. It's great if you have this attitude towards writing, but it's hardly universal. Many of us make liberal use of the fact that we're allowed to drag our heels, and I don't think the story suffers for it. It's like slow food, right? More time, better taste. Sometimes. Potentially.
Several of my friends who have ADHD or anxiety and have difficulty focusing use Mozart piano concertos. There were some studies in the 90 about music and concentration, and apparently, Mozart seemed to help people with focus. I had a college professor who used to play Mozart during our exams for that reason.
I have tried music a bit today, and I think I am on to something! Feel like I need to do some set-up of playlists and whatnot, because so far I was fiddling with youtube and youtube is full of other distractions, but I'm excited to have a new route to explore!
I could not write in the mornings - in the morning I have the brain function of a dead fish so I do mundane tasks and all the stuff I want too do. Like hang out on here, watch movies and so on. At night, after diner, my brain wakes up and I can work. So maybe look at when you're brain functions the best?
Congrats. I know it's been a big help to me. Experiment a lot. The best music for writing isn't always your favorite music (especially if you're a person who pays attention to lyrics). I don't know how diverse your taste is in music, but I find different genres, and different moods especially, work better for different projects, which is also a good way to discover new favorites or learn to appreciate things that were previously more peripheral to your sphere. The horror story that keeps sidetracking me from my WIP, for instance, seems to benefit from industrial and trip-hop that I haven't listened to much since the 90's and was never as into as several other things at the time, which also makes Slacker Radio and Spotify two of my favorite writing tools. Music discovery is so much easier than it was back then.
Most people do have other jobs, writing very rarely pays the bills unless you're a big name. But it doesn't really change anything, if someone is serious about writing as more than a hobby, then they have to have self-control and be able to produce words on a page. Wanting to write doesn't make one a writer. Only writing does.
Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka were practically hobbyists. They were still writers. Mark Twain had discipline and follow through problems. He shelved projects for years at a time and went broke and had to take other jobs when he was barely writing. He was still a professional, published author. Those are of course examples of people who did put words on a page, as you say, even if sporadically in the latter case, but writing can be a profession, a hobby, a calling, a therapy tool, etc. You don't have to enter the Tour de France to be a cyclist. Granted, you do actually have to ride a bike. I'll give you that. But you don't have to ride and train every day. I think some people frequently mix up the word "writer" with "author", "novelist" and several other words that denote professional aspirations, which is more a matter of semantics than philosophy, really, and therefore hardly worth arguing over. That's just an opinion though.
I'm talking about writers in the sense of people who produce saleable works. Clemens couldn't have become a published author if he never produced a finished work. Yes, you can set things aside, but if you never come back to it, if you create a million first chapters and never create a last one, then you're not going to be successful. You have to sit down and write. That's true if you're just writing fanfic or if you're writing professional novels, those words don't get there if you don't write them.