Distraction smackdown
I began this post in a spiral-bound notebook, the words running together in thin blue ink. The first draft shaped up while I was sitting in a playground, my legs half-sunk in sun-hot sand, the kid and his father playing next to me. I wrote the second under the hum of the washer and the whine of distant drilling and guttural dog barks. Distractions of this sort -- the frisk of wind through the trees, the UPS truck, the clang of a stone against metal -- don't pull me away from my work. They may even be necessary. When I'm immersed, the sounds of the world disappear. When I need to resurface, they provide something else to concentrate on.
Spending the time between sentences thinking, being, and exploring is qualitatively different from spending that time seeking and clicking. Writing on my computer, I am easily taken off course by the pursuit of shiny fact. I skim, I kick my feet in the shallows, but never plunge in. Getting deep into writing is hard. It scares me. Like most writers I worry that my stories are no good, or that I will lead myself into dead water, trap my narrative in the mud. But when my mind flits here and there, tracing the edges without risking the plunge, I feel like I'm wasting my life.
I've been thinking a lot about fear lately, how it has ruled my life to a large extent, from my worries about driving a car to my reluctance to risk friendship. I am facing the fear. It is time to push through self-doubt, push myself into the depths, which means that I have to fight against the pull of the Internet as well as the pull of perfectionism.
So. I'm going to write my drafts in longhand or on a typewriter. One or two days a week, I will ask my husband to take the modem with him so that when I am not writing, I am forced to remove my mind from its high state of distraction, to remember or recreate what I did for all those years before we had wireless.
The no-techness and portability of a notebook and a pen pleases me. The three of us will hang out together, lazy in the sun, perched on park benches, sitting at tables in libraries and coffee shops. Sometimes I'll drag out the old Royal portable, punch out my manuscripts, thrill in the tangibility of each return. Perhaps, like an old (and crazy) friend of Mr. X I will drag the portable around town with me. My powerful clacks and whirs will both annoy and intrigue my fellow coffee shop denizens. They will glare, concentration pulled, as they sweep and tap their fingers against flat screens and plastic keyboards.
Writing isn't about speed, it's about thinking, about revision, about building up and whittling down to get to the truth of a matter. Changing the method doesn't determine the quality of the work or make it easier to create. But it will help me go deeper into the narrative. If I don't slow down and unplug, I will never finish anything and if I never finish anything, I will feel like a fraud, unfulfilled, weak and wanting.
Who needs to live like that?