Reading an article from Neal Stephenson recently, I was struck by a similarity: like me, Stephenson shuns the "social-networking, build-a-platform" author model.
Best exemplified by Stephenie Meyers, this truism holds that authors should be out, about and available for importuning readers.
Stephenson bucks the trend, and explained that his best and highest use is to write, not hang about message boards, follow friends on Twitter or attend conferences. For him, interruptions are the great productivity killer; give him an uninterrupted week, and you get a book chapter.
All I can say is, "Amen, brother"--and this week, I began putting a version of this model to the test.
Two days in, I love it.
By rescheduling my cleaner, grouping my errands, and most of all, demanding the change of myself, I've set aside the core weekdays--Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday--for work.
No appointments, no interruptions, no workers in the house.
With luck and a quiet Monday, this gives me four days a week to sit, think, work, code and otherwise ply my trade.
Because what I do isn't like knitting. You can put down your knitting needles and pick up where you left off, but the writing life doesn't work like that.
For me, at least. And with Stephenson's disclosure, I'm in good company.
My new motto: Go away and let me do my thing.
I'm doing it. It feels GOOD.
Comments
Your suspicion of
Your suspicion of social-networking sites has much merit. However, there is a sacrifice. One of my old professor friends linked to me in Facebook a revisitation of "The Strength of Weak Ties", which elaborates how cultivating extended nodes of weak acquaintanceships can reap benefits in opportunities and improvements in social status. I've certainly found Facebook to be very helpful in keeping up with people I otherwise would find difficult to communicate with. In this function, such sites can be a productive tool.
Certainly, however, writing and other arts that demand deep and long periods of concentration are harmed by the instant-access trend in online communications. The solitary moment, free from electronic buzzing, allowing us quiescence necessary to meditative work, is being squozen out of us by the technocratic hegemonies. This goes hand in hand with the quickly eroding ability of people to hold and develop complex thoughts, and elaborate them with language. The book as a medium, indeed even the paragraph, may soon be McLuhaned out of fashion.
Twitter seems most egregious in this respect. I simply find it unusable, demanding we reduce our thoughts to barely more than jungle grunts or semaphore. Why it has been so widely adopted by the Boomer generation, I simply can't fathom. It may be a progressive sign that Facebook, which still skews to Generation X and Y, has opened up the bottlenecks on notes and comments; now one can articulate a full thought and expect others to engage on an intellectually more enriching level.