Researching work distractions, Part 2, I watched my seventh consecutive YouTube video, dashed to the kitchen and scribbled:

“Dinner will be late. Still too much work to do!”

There. I’d written something for the day. To justify, I decided those videos are not distractions but storytelling insight.

Many corporations attempt the close connection of this “view from the couch” with consumer storytelling. Whenever speaking to college classes about writing profiles, I encourage students to snuggle readers closer to their subjects by including conversational asides that seal universal ties: “No, it had to be more than five years ago, Vera, because we still had Puff.”

A friend emailed a YouTube link of decade-old Seattle square dancing that includes “our old friend Lee Stripling,” my late dad. Once in YouTube, my mind drifted to my other 2009 loss, my dog. That took me to “Intelligent Border Collie Puppy” with 206,271 other viewers, all probably also ignoring deadlines.

In Texshan74’s popular upload, Star, 3½ months, picks out different toys by name to the command “brang-it!” She shuts herself into her own crate for “nigh, nigh” and fetches a newspaper half her size.

Like all the best dog stories, this one has a beginning, a middle but no end. In other installments, Star shines in her first agility test. She holds a paw over her one eye in mock shame when her ribbons, strung like fish, include no blue. We see Star collecting trash at 7½ months, Star’s failure at herding deer, Star leaping on and off her owner’s back to catch a Frisbee at age 1.

No Hollywood script. No high budget. But enough intimacy that soon I envy not just Texshan74′s two-way devotion to this pup but also her brick-red tile, clean house, snaking driveway and off-porch wildlife.

Ties that bind. Evidence grows that we’re hurtling through a creative period rich with storytelling. If Star also celebrates her second and third birthdays on YouTube: I say, “brang-it!”

Raucous home repair sent my laptop and me back to my chicken coop seeking refuge: The world’s hardest thing to find.

I created an office space out an old chicken coop years ago, saving a fir and cedar loft from fast returning to nature under a glistening moss roof. I escaped there whenever I faced big deadlines, saving my life and my career. I could concentrate – no Internet, no phone and no company, critical since my home office was mislabeled: “guest room, sleep as late as you like.”

My writing cabin: quiet except for the mice

Eventually too many jobs required Internet research and too many mice moved in. One night a 100-year-old poplar shouted “Timber-r-r-r!” in 70mph winds, sending what we euphemistically called “my cabin” on an awkward two-foot journey to the east.

Now I have concentration issues of a different sort, same as most of us. Some days I check email or search Google 10 to 20 times an hour, sometimes by need, mostly by compulsion. My cell phone, the landline, the door bell work in harmony: hopeful signs they may soon hit the road as a trio.

The radio was squished by the tree

But before I opened the padlock and knocked away the cobwebs in my quiet old chicken coop this week, I looked up: What people say about the struggle to focus.

The list leader is my favorite study of all time − the psychiatrist at King’s College in London who gave IQ tests to three groups:
• One performed the IQ test only
• One was distracted by email and cell phones
• One smoked dope and took the test
The first group won, of course, beating the others by an average 10 points. But, as blogger Tim Ferriss points out, the stoners beat the e-mailers by an average of 6 points. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, baby!

I turned to my yearly attempt at self-improvement, Sunday newspaper supplements. The January issues of Parade magazine has article called, “Make Happiness Happen,” the authors say, “Do one thing at a time—at least for one or two hours a day.” Now that! I am going to do.

The chickens moved to the milk shed beside my writing coop

On the granola, high-brow side, this month’s Utne Reader describes us as “A Nation Distracted.” Workers spend an average of 11 minutes on a project before switching to another. During those 11 minutes, we typically change tasks every three minutes. Click. Click. Click.

Interruption scientist Gloria Mark’s research shows that when we are interrupted, it takes an average 25 minutes to regain the same degree of concentration. And that’s not counting how long it takes you to find your glasses.

Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, from which the article is excerpted, speaks to me when she says, we must “learn to inhibit the response to the lure of distraction.”

We are what we focus on. By nurturing our abilities to pay attention, she says, we can shape our lives to “recover the ability to pause,
focus, connect, judge and enter deeply into relationships and ideas.”

Will I thank the workmen for sending me back to my refuge? Will I find the mice have all grown up and gone away? I don’t know. But I’ll
find out, and I won’t use Google to do it, either.

Reading your writing aloud to pick up inconsistencies and make sure your voice flows smoothly is common practice. I got the rare treat of hearing how my writing voice sounds on film when I wrote and spoke the narration for “Winging My Way Back Home: The Stripling Fiddle Legacy.”

This intro has evolved into the trailer for the film about my dad, Lee Stripling, as Seattle filmmaker Jeri Vaughn works on the final version. It sets the tone but feels long, as if it delays meatier parts of the film. We welcome your suggestions.

Stripling Brothers Documentary from Jeri Vaughn on Vimeo.

“When you put your heart out to him, there’s his heart ready for you, and probably he goes first.” – Sandy Bradley, Northwest musician and the folklorist who found Charlie Stripling’s son in Seattle, helping my dad keep the music alive.

Finding the right voice to tell stories in second or third person is difficult. You have to muzzle The Writer, even though it’s you.

The Writer is too formal in early drafts. And then she’s too casual. She can’t find her way because she’s not confident enough of the details, and it shows.

Ivan Doig's This House of Sky: Always a favorite voice

To speed up familiarity, I keep copies of voices that I like near my desk. Once I’ve cleared a path through all the information, I pull out old favorites in hopes that the rhythm will rub off and serve as a knowing guide.

Occasionally, my own writing works. Here’s one lead I used to read from a story on whether Seattle had lost its soul:

“On a warm summer night last July, Barbara Curtis gave us a rare chance to see how well Seattle’s heart has endured. As Curtis, Seafair Queen of 1950, led the 1999 Torchlight Parade as grand marshal, she brought most of the crowd of 350,000 to its feet, inspiring a snaking roar of cheers as she passed.

That’s the Seattle of old: good-hearted, steadfast, always up for a hokey civic event – and dressed for a parade (even at the opera.).”

More often I reach for favorites reads. Almost any page will do from Gretel Erhlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces. Or I’ll read this descriptive paragraph about an old couple, Kate and Walter Badgett, in Ivan Doig’s wonderful “This House of Sky.”

“Atop that crate of a body was an owlish face, and a swift tongue that could operate Walter all day long and still have time to tell what the rest of Ringling was doing. On her desk by the front window which looked across the tracks to the gas station and post office-store, Kate kept her pair of binoculars. Who had come to town, for how long and maybe even what they bought − it all came up the magnifying tunnel of vision to Kate, then went out with new life, as if having added to itself while re-echoing through that bulk of body.”

Oh, to have a voice like that.

I’m researching and writing about voice over the next weeks because of two sudden life improvements:

• I got hired for a lovely long-term job based on the strength of my writing voice.
• I finally get it why I blog.

Voice has always taken precedence for me over the loblolly of facts and other mires. I feel a strong, consistent voice introduces me to the host when I read so I know immediately whether I want to cross the threshold and sit.

I’ve had the same writing voice since grade school, give or take a little Debra Winger rasping. Speaking of acting, I can change the hue and tone on demand.

This new job wants playful and inspired: a relief. I’ve worried that clips in my portfolio might show too much fun for business writing or that I’ll never get a job again that relishes a story about the soaring cost of boat diesel told in pirate dialect.

Which leads me to finding the benefit of blogging for multiple sites: All that casual writing has dusted off my old conversational voice.

I thought I heard the whoosh of the school bus door this afternoon. I felt the dogs rise from their eternal rest as I turned from my desk, united in happy anticipation for one half step.

Alex and Nell: With me today as I write