On locking your phone in the car

...and other thoughts on dodging distraction, via Meg Mason, Zadie Smith and more.

Photo by Rachel Martin on Unsplash

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I love every In Writing podcast guest equally, of course – but Meg Mason was a delight. Funny and frank, she’s the author of Sorrow and Bliss, one of the novels I’ve enjoyed the most over the last few years, and I loved our conversation on the podcast.

I’ve been thinking about her this week, because I’m considering taking September off social media while I get my MA dissertation finished, and Meg is one of the many writers I admire who have no social media presence (or nothing public, anyway). When she came on the podcast, she told me a bit more about how she avoids online distractions:

I think the only thing that I’ve really learnt, and become quite good at and quite militant about, is to not have my phone anywhere remotely near me. I don’t bring it out to the [writing] shed, because I think there’s a level of thought that you can get to in twenty minutes, and then there’s a level much deeper than that, which you need to get to, to create good fiction. In between those two layers is a pain barrier that you’ve got to get through, and the only way to get through it is to just sit there and wait for it to pass. But in that pain zone is where you naturally reach for your phone, because it’s a distraction and it’s kind of analgesic, but it just keeps you coming back up to that top layer of thought, and then you have to repeat the process more and more. It’s actually the phone that’s creating the pain in the first place. So I’m quite stringent about that, and I’ll often either turn it off, or I’ll take it and put it in the glovebox of the car, and just make it an absolute hassle to have to go and get it. That’s quite an important thing to me, which I heartily recommend.

Meg’s not the only guest who’s talked about the benefits of dodging technology. Liane Moriarty talked about using the Freedom app to limit her internet access while she writes, and said it’s become so much part of her process that when she sets Freedom to run for a certain number of hours, she feels she’s programming herself to write for that long as well. Maggie O’Farrell does emails and admin in a small office in her house, but does her real writing in a studio at the bottom of the garden, which very deliberately has no internet access.

I do this stuff myself – I set my phone to a specially calibrated Focus mode, so that I won’t be disturbed during work unless one of my editors calls me. Sometimes I also use Freedom (it’s very good). Yesterday and today have been long days of writing, because I had two big features due, and I got them both done. But it’s not the distractions at the desk that worry me really – it’s a more nebulous feeling that social media is stealing from my limited stock of attention.

I might not be looking at it while I’m on deadline, but somehow it’s running in the background of my brain all the same. I know too much about things that don’t matter: I have videos and jokes and bits of social information hovering around the corners of my awareness, things I’ve seen on Instagram or Twitter, not at my desk, but maybe while I was waiting for the kettle to boil. My dissertation is due in under a fortnight, I still have a lot of work to do, and I could do with preserving as much of my attention-energy as I can.

Some people hate social media anyway, but I find it difficult to detach from this stuff. I like being involved; I like to chat. (Some people might say it’s to do with being a Gemini. As my wise agent, whose birthday is a fortnight after mine, once said: ‘I don't believe much in star signs, but I do believe in Geminis.’)

If I do my September break, I may still log on to share the newsletter and newly published work – this seems to be part of a journalist’s job now, and it feels unthinkable to go completely dark. If I really miss the chatter, can I allow myself to browse on Sundays, too?

You can see I’ve really engaged my iron will on this one.

How do you do it? If social media is your thing, have you had success in taking breaks? What impact did you notice?

When I spoke to my friend Hannah Meltzer about this, she pointed me in the direction of Zadie Smith’s 2013 essay ‘Man versus Corpse’, from her collection Feel Free. Smith is another one who sensibly doesn’t lower herself to tweeting, and in the essay (which is mostly about death) she compliments Karl Ove Knausgård’s writing as showing an ability to ‘be fully present in and mindful of his own existence’.

The essay shows Smith’s own brilliant ability to lead the reader to a point circuitously, with full control of what she’s doing, and so it’s a shame to skip to the end – but I’m going to (and hope you’ll read the whole thing). She concludes:

'You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, the ability to just sit there … That’s being a person … Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty – forever empty.’

That’s the comedian Louis C.K., practising his comedy-cum-art-cum-philosophy, reminding us that we’ll all one day become corpses. His aim, in that skit, was to rid us of our smartphones, or at least get us to use the damn things a little less (‘You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your products, and then you die’), and it went viral, and many people smiled sadly at it and thought how correct it was and how everybody (except them) should really maybe switch off their smartphones, and spend more time with live people offline because everybody (except them) was really going to die one day, and be dead for ever, and shouldn’t a person live – truly live, a real life – while they’re alive?

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On Sunday I’ll send out the In Writing Creative Club prompt to paid subscribers, and I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

Until then, have a good writing week!