Novelists' distractions

For Media Circus, Tim Dowling considers the five biggest distractions faced by novelists.

Try to arrange things so that there are several flights of stairs between you and anything remotely worth eating. My office is in the attic of our house and the kitchen is on the ground floor, so when I weigh up the choice between starting a new chapter and having some toast, I have to factor in the journey. This is, of course, exactly the wrong way round - walking down the stairs is no real bother, and once I am in the kitchen the prospect of going all the way back up again means that making several dozen profiteroles shaped like swans suddenly seems a better use of my time.