The brutal truth about the Internet and creative work
Like Mark Boyle, we can work slower, and yet get more done in less time
A few years ago, Mark Boyle, an Irish writer and environmental activist, made the radical decision to give up all modern technology and move into a cabin he had made with his own hands. Moving forward, he would support himself entirely with the work of his hands on his smallholding.
Before he pulled the plug, however, a book publisher caught wind of his plans and convinced him to sign a contract to write a book about his Thoreau-like off-the-grid experience (The Way Home, reviewed by Jonathon on Utopian Idiots earlier this week here). Only problem? When Boyle said he was giving up all modern technology, he meant it. No computer. No tablet. Not even a typewriter.
Indeed, he agonized even about the pencils and paper he bought at a nearby art shop, fantasizing about making his own ink and quill pens.
But there was his book contract. "Fu**ing impossible" is how describes his initial efforts to write without the help of his old laptop. No copy-and-paste, no spell-check, no thesaurus, no immediate access to the entire treasure trove of human wisdom (and folly) on the Internet. “In the heart of winter," he writes," I noticed myself scrunching up piece of paper after piece of paper, each one containing too many errors of grammar, type or judgement, or needing more editing than one sliver of wood pulp could endure from a rubber.”
But then, something began to change. “It’s now July, and I’m halfway through this book," he wrote, seven months into his experiment. "For the first time in my life I’m actually enjoying the process of writing.”
My head no longer hurts at the end of a long day. I find myself staring into the orchard for prolonged periods before I even put pen to paper, but when I finally act I can write fifteen hundred words without stopping. My thinking has got slower. Just as carpenters always recommend measuring twice and cutting once, I’ve begun thinking twice and writing once.
In the end, Boyle completed an 85,000-word meditation on technology, sustainability, and back-to-the-earth living entirely using pencil and paper. And he did this during a year in which he was also learning how to produce all of his own food (often biking forty kilometres round trip to the nearest river to try his hand at catching pike).
As Boyle notes, there was something strangely paradoxical about his efforts to write under the extraordinarily limited conditions of his self-imposed exile. “The writing itself is slower," he notes, "yet somehow I manage to get more done in less time."
Every person who has ever attempted to write on an Internet-connected laptop knows exactly what the source of this paradox is.
Once one has gotten the taste of typing at eighty words per minute (gratuitous brag: I can push 110, when I’m trying), it's hard to imagine ever going back. On a laptop a skilled typist can pour out fifteen hundred words in less than an hour. One’s thoughts barely have the chance to outstrip one’s fingers. And then there's the information! Every writer knows the feeling of starting to write an article or a bit of fiction, then realizing that one doesn't know fact X. How easy it seems to just “pop on” to Google and get the answer.
But somehow that search for fact X becomes the search for fact Y and Z, and so on. An hour or two later, that first sentence sits half-written, glowering judgmentally at the fool who cannot finish what he begins.
Boyle's descriptions of enhanced productivity under seemingly-impossible constraints immediately call to mind the example of Wendell Berry.
Berry is, of course, one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. With over thirty published volumes of poetry, nineteen works of fiction, and some thirty-eight works of non-fiction, including the profoundly influential jeremiad The Unsettling of America, he is also one of the most prolific.
And yet, Berry has never owned a computer. He writes his world-changing works from a tiny farmhouse on his property in Kentucky. And he, like Boyle, writes those works by hand, with pencil and paper. Machinery only comes into the picture when he hands his hand-written manuscript to his wife, who types it up on the same Royal Standard typewriter that they bought in 1956.
Let’s make this painfully personal. Right now, I'm halfway through writing the final chapter of my dissertation - a study of Thomas Aquinas' philosophy of memory. In the past 13 months I've written some 100,000 words, or 300 double-spaced pages, of philosophical prose, with 500+ footnotes, most of which has met with the approval of my advisor. Statistically speaking, not bad.
And yet, in my heart of hearts, I know that I should be done by now. Far too much time has been wasted. And when I look back at how or why time has been wasted, it's almost always the same two things: the computer and the Internet.
It's not that the Internet and the computer don't help. They do, and have, immensely. Indeed, the scholar operating in the Internet-age has certain, almost unimaginable advantages over his predecessors, including at-your-fingertips access to huge quantities of primary manuscripts and secondary scholarship, downloadable and often searchable.
And yet, for all that, by far the most productive period of my dissertation-writing began when I finally decided to completely exclude the Internet from my work space. I rent an office down the street from my house. I asked the owner of that office to change the WiFi password without telling me what it was, so that I wouldn’t even be tempted.
Initially, the change was painful, and I often found myself wishing that I could just "pop on" to the web to search for document X, Y, or Z, or do a quick Google search. Instead, however, I learned to plan my days around the lack of Internet access. As I worked, I would simply jot down the articles that I needed to download or the questions that I needed to Google. And instead of searching then and there, I would keep plugging away. To my surprise, my anxious belief that I needed some piece of information or document this very instant in order to continue typically vanished, as I discovered I could easily work around the lack.
Rather than allowing every speedbump to send me careening off into the wilderland of the Internet, I kept my head down, and produced, batching my Internet usage into short periods at home before or after work.
The brutal reality that we all know, but that we so often convince ourselves to forget, is that those gleaming, shining things that promise to make us more productive are precisely what are stealing our creative mojo. They, not the "creative temperament" or whatever excuse we come up with, are what are preventing us from getting into the meditative mental space where creativity is even possible. They are why we don’t write/compose/paint/play/make one-tenth as much as we have vowed that we would.
Instead of becoming creators, we have become information junkies, chasing distraction the minute the work becomes difficult, which is often precisely the moment when we stood on the threshold of the flow state in which we might have accomplished something worth doing.
Like Mark Boyle and Wendell Berry, we who wish to create must learn to impose on ourselves the stringent limitations that open up possibilities. Then, like Boyle, we too may find ourselves working more “slowly,” and yet somehow getting more done in less time.