Far from the madding crowd
Hawthornden Castle, near Edinburgh, by Caroline Brothers
This article first appeared in the autumn 2018 issue of The Author
‘You are strongly advised to make arrangements to forego internet access,’ read the letter offering a place as a writing fellow at Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle. ‘Mobile phones do not work inside the castle’, it added. ‘Hawthornden is not suitable for those who require... continual access to the internet.’
I was half expecting to find Dante’s injunction inscribed above a portcullis: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
One could be forgiven for mistaking a month at Hawthornden, a romantic castle perched on a crag over a forested glen in Scotland, as rehab for writers seeking to kick their online addiction. But then, online disconnection was partly why I had applied. Although I’d never been trolled like Mary Beard, never clashed swords online like J. K. Rowling and Piers Morgan, I was feeling dismayed by the web’s distracting lure. For my new novel, I had decided to go cold turkey.
The issue of online connectivity – how to manage it, how it is changing us, how it is affecting the nature and productivity of our working lives – is not just an issue for authors. But it can be a particularly pressing one for those who labour alone before a computer screen, the same one on which, more often than not, we also conduct our research.
Authors such as Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers have all spoken out on the issue, which has also become a prime subject for neuroscientists studying the creative mind.
The tension between public and private that is inherent in managing any online presence can feel particularly acute for writers, given how often we are exhorted to increase our ‘discoverability’ through social media interaction. ‘Seven times can lead to a purchase!’ authors attending a session on PR and marketing at the London Book Fair were told in April, in reference to the number of encounters thought to prompt a book sale. ‘Follow gatekeepers, ask questions, “like”, retweet, have conversations, Twitter chats, help people out – make the most of the community,’ was the session’s take-home advice.
Yet engaging with readers through websites and Facebook pages, interacting with them via Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and other accounts, adding your reactions to the comments sections of articles – all this takes thought and time, and makes it increasingly difficult for authors to withdraw into the solitude that many find necessary for reverie or constructive thought.
Paul Silvia, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, is a neuroscience researcher with a longstanding interest in the psychology of creativity, and in writing in particular. He says that disconnecting from writing in order to connect online, far from providing a small dopamine injection of stimulation, may have negative effects.
‘Without a doubt it is hurting people’s ability to concentrate,’ he says. The difficulty is that ‘it is hard to deliberately enter the kinds of contemplative, focused “flow” states in which writers seem to flourish, so that a quick e-mail check or Twitter notification can knock you out for good.’
‘I'm reluctant to say that there’s one right way to do creative work,’ he continues, ‘but clearly, most people suffer from interruption and disengagement, and it hurts the clarity and focus of their thinking much more than they think.’
Silvia’s arguments are underpinned by current thinking about the way creativity operates. The old left brain/right brain models, and others that sought to locate creativity in a particular centre of the brain, have now been largely discarded, he says. ‘Creativity isn't a part of the brain,’ he explains, ‘but something incredibly complex that the brain can do’.
Recent research suggests that in creative activity, two brain networks are in operation at once. One, the so-called executive control network, is responsible for focusing attention, inhibiting distractions, managing many things at once, and exerting control over thoughts. The other, known as the default-mode or imagination network, is responsible for what Silvia calls ‘spontaneous thought, mental imagery, mental simulations, and the general background tone of mind-wandering and mental chatter’.
‘Normally these two modes of thought are antagonistic: While one is active the other is suppressed,’ Silvia says. ‘But when people are working on creative problems, these two normally opposing networks cooperate’ in a so-called flow state, which may prove more delicate that we imagine to maintain. Understanding exactly how these two forms work together is, he adds, currently a hot topic in neuroscientific research.
Another hot topic – certainly a heated one – concerns the addictive nature of social media interaction, and its inherently unsatisfactory nature – the ‘likes’ that seem too few, or that don’t translate into ‘retweets’ or ‘follows’, affecting one’s mood or driving one’s thoughts elsewhere. Hitting a difficult passage while writing can make it tempting to slide the cursor over to that Facebook page or that Twitter account just for a second, only to look up again and realise an hour or two have vanished in the sticky clutches of the world wide web. Links, pop-up ads, cookie notices, message notifications, click-bait stories – all conspire to maximise the length of time our eyeballs spend on pages other than the blank ones we are meant to be filling. It can take a conscious effort to get back to the work in progress after the simplest internet search.
Perhaps that is why a number of writers have come up with their own strategies to combat the beguiling pull of the web.
The American author Dave Eggers, whom no one could accuse of a lack of productivity, refuses to write on a computer connected to the internet, not even for email access.
‘Trying to write with my email open is like writing at a circus,’ Eggers was quoted as telling an interviewer at Indiana University Bloomington. The solution he found: visiting a public library once a day to go online.
In Being a Writer, an anthology of writing tips collected by Travis Elborough and Helen Gordon, Zadie Smith advises writers to ‘Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.’ Herself a Hawthornden alumni, she also thanks two software programmes, Freedom and Self Control, ‘for creating the time’ in the acknowledgements section of her novel NW. Both sites completely block access to the Internet over specific timeframes; according to The Telegraph, the writers Nick Hornby and Naomi Klein are also fans.
The Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who posts almost daily on Twitter, earlier this year took what some might see as the radical step of absenting herself from the micro-blogging platform altogether. On 25 March she advised her 1.94 million followers: ‘Will be away from internet connection for a while.’
Four days later, she was back.
Will Self, who has used an old typewriter to thrash out his first drafts since 2003, says writers should just get a grip on themselves and their online angst. Those most worried by online distraction should consider an age-old method: writing by hand.
While that may not be practical for many of us, there are other methods. The late literary agent David Miller advised only brief sorties on Twitter, ideally twice a day at set times. The playwright David Wheatley, determined to keep technology at arm’s length, keeps a bundle of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons in his desk, which he takes out at times another writer might feel tempted to go online.
‘Strictly speaking they aren’t just for taking a break, but are for stimulating a “new thought” when I’ve got a bit stuck with a script,’ says Wheatley. ‘If I need to research anything, I hope to have done it during the planning/procrastination stage, and if I need a quick fact-check I treat it like a kid afraid of the dark whose favourite toy is down in the basement.’
On top of considerations related to the writing process come broader worries, vocalised recently by Howard Jacobson, and most famously by Jonathan Franzen, related to how the hyperconnectivity of our era may be damaging the practice of reading and writing in broader cultural terms.
In a BBC TV interview with Stephen Sackur in September 2017, Jacobson railed against social media for its impact on concentration, on the understanding of context and the use of language, refuting Sackur’s suggestion that it was just a generational issue and that digital natives were simply more adept at multi-tasking. ‘They can’t [multi-task], they’re not reading, they can’t concentrate,’ Jacobsen said. And he cited concerns among neuroscientists about the impact of mobile and social media interactions on memory.
But it is Franzen who, in a 2003 article in The Atlantic, has spoken most forcefully about the potential dangers of joining the online conversation. He warned writers against becoming ‘simply another loudspeaker for what already exists’, losing sight of the individuality of their thoughts and their voice.
‘Even as I spend half my day on the internet – doing email, buying plane tickets, ordering stuff online, looking at bird pictures, all of it – I personally need to be careful to restrict my access,’ he said. ‘I need to make sure I still have a private self. Because the private self is where my writing comes from.’
Paul Silvia, for his part, has noticed that authors never seem to complain that they don’t have enough time to surf the web. ‘It is telling,’ he says, ‘that almost no writers try to commit to spending more time online, more time on social media, or more time splitting their energy between their stories and whatever is scrolling on Facebook. Instead, nearly everyone is trying to whittle away the distractions that pick at their brain while they write.’
In the event, a wifi-free month at Hawthornden proved much more productive than I’d dared hope. Although initially I found myself reaching for my mobile, which could only capture a signal at a high point in the grounds (on the steps up to the orchard!), I ended up feeling much more in control of my writing day. Crucially, I gained much more time for reading other writers. Admittedly, preparation for the month had involved heading off a lot of online hassle by handling it in advance, and I still found myself breaking out once or twice a week to catch the bus to the nearest wi-fi café. But by the end, I found I didn’t miss the online chatter much at all, nor feel a great compulsion to return to it once I got home.
The test, of course, will be to see if it lasts.
Caroline Brothers is working on her next novel, and trying to stay offline.