caught in the net?

[sheenaghpugh]

A witter occasioned by the fact that one of my writing friends resolutely refuses to go online, simply because, she says, she knows she would become addicted to it and waste too much potential writing time. This is a statement that tends to resonate ruefully with most writers, certainly me because I am the world's champion procrastinator and user of other activities as distraction techniques - ie the only time I suddenly find it essential to vacuum the carpet is when I ought to be writing instead.

It's a fact that going online for ten minutes to do necessary research tends to morph into hours spent enjoyably doing nothing very productive, and another writer I know told me recently that he spends ages bouncing between about half a dozen sites - email, blog, mailing lists, forums etc - on the ground that something might have happened on one of them during the 10 minutes he was away. Again this is all too familiar and I think we all tell ourselves that were it not for the internet we'd probably be about two books ahead of where we are.

Curiously enough, though, the friend who told me that is currently a very productive novelist. I've also found that when away from home and the internet I don't necessarily do that much more work; instead other activities, like taking exercise or learning Norwegian, suddenly demand priority. I'm coming round to the suspicion that you are either in the mood for writing or you aren't; if you are, not much can stop you but if you aren't, almost any distraction technique will do. (Unless there's a deadline on the horizon; they have no effect on some people but they do work for me.)

I'm really not sure whether the internet has been good for me as a writer or not, but I tend to think on balance it has. I have certainly written poems I would not have written without it, either because the research would have been too difficult by other means or because the internet itself was the background and inspiration (eg a set of "Webcam Sonnets" which were all about online interaction).

OTOH, the two novels I've managed to write were different, I researched the first in books and via travel (spending days in an archivist's office copying from microfiche). The second started from a book but then went into the country of the imagination; I more or less invented a place and time for it to happen in and I think it was the better for that. And a lot of my poems have started from travel, from getting out and about, even if the last sequence I wrote was inspired not by the actual weekend I spent in Dublin but by the book I bought at the airport. I once thought I might be able to get a novel out of my then-addiction to The Sims, but decided in the end that a protagonist who did little but sit in front of a screen would need a hell of an active inner life not to bore the reader.

Just for interest, two of the Webcam Sonnets are behind the cut - they appeared first in the mags Poetry Wales and Seam, and will be in my next, Long-Haul Travellers which I hope will come out in autumn.



Voyeur

When the cam refreshes, a warehouse window
has turned into a point of white light;

by the next thirty-second update
it's a blinding disc. You think explosion

and what can I do and nothing. Watch it happen.
The seconds count down; your gut tenses.

You breathe in at the change, see radiance
welling out over half the screen. Beautiful.

Not beautiful. There might be people:
if you keep looking, you might see them die.

But you keep looking. And when, blessedly,
the update shows, after all, sun dazzling

off glass, no worse, it doesn't leave you feeling
much better. You know what you would do.


Contact

A man stands at a prearranged time
in a certain spot, smiling fixedly

towards a camera he can't see,
mobile ringing close to his ear.

A woman answers, takes her phone over
to a screen. I'm clicking in Favourites

but it's taking for ever to load the site,
stay where you are, don't move… Oh,

I can see you now. I can see you.
The small, fuzzy picture shows a place

halfway across the world, and there he is,
in his blue shirt, at this very moment,

not seeing her. She cannot speak, intent
on his blurred face, hardly hearing him.


EDIT: from Long-Haul Travellers, Seren 2008

Comments

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I have never found that no being online has stopped me from doing vast amounts of probably unneccesary stuff (often under the banner of 'reseach...')

Lovely poems, deceptively simple* and eloquently flowing.

[federhirn.livejournal.com]

I have every intention of trying Dorothea Brande's advice (apparently they worked wonders for Mark Jenkins and Susannah Clarke, among others).

That said, I'm quite sure that I have been reigning world champion procrastinator these past two years, ever since the course-induced impetus dropped away...

[sheenaghpugh]

May we know what advice that is? I could google Brande but who knows where that might lead:)

[federhirn.livejournal.com]

Lots of stuff about separating critic and intuitive writer.

I think the big ones boil down to:
1) get up half an hour earlier than usual, and write for half an hour every morning, no matter what, even if it's just stream of consciousness initially.
2) every day, make a 15 minute appointment at some point during the (working) day to write stuff - again, almost anything, even stream of consciousness material.

After a few weeks / months of this, the brain supposedly learns some writerly discipline, and it becomes easier to write on call. I have no idea whether it works, so I'm going to give it a shot...

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I've found that the more time I have for writing, the less I do because it's so easy to put off till later.

Lovely poems, esp the second one because I can see myself doing this when Greg's away.

Just wanted to say

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the post