Why Writers Shouldn’t Fear Distraction But Embrace It
A (large) handful of years ago, I was so distracted by wanting to find out the reason why a guy I’d liked ghosted me, I spent all my writing time “researching” his doings and beings on the Internet instead of putting words to the page for my next essay, story, or novel. I was a mess because of it, cursing my lack of productivity and lack of generating on-the-page material as a huge personal failure.
(That’s Me in the Spotlight, Losing My Concentration.)
Ashamed and embarrassed, I kept it all to myself, telling no one about the rabbit holes I’d go down online starting with the guy, but extending out into his Facebook friends, his new girlfriend’s sparkling artistic career, his path crossing with an old friend of mine I’d lost touch with and their friendship blossoming—I could go on, but you get the idea.
I watched this as if it was an enthralling telenovela and I, the slighted central character, except I would have made for a very boring protagonist, spending all that time looking at other lives on the screen.
It could have spelled the end of my writing life, or at least I feared it did, because every time I sat down with some time to spare, it all evaporated doing this pointless sleuthing. So what if his girlfriend won an award? Who cares if he had a fancy new fellowship, or if they were moving to a glamorous-looking new address in a city I wouldn’t have been able to afford to live like that in? It all felt meaningless, and I felt myself staring down a void, too much access to these portals into other people’s worlds. Meaning: social media.
I didn’t delete my accounts, but I did what I’d tended to do when I’d been obsessed in the past: with place (Mexico City, yielding my first novel vaguely based on my high school years there), with issues (gay marriage before it was legal, a memoir about a marriage to my friend), and with questions (should our parents be able to give input on our choice of romantic partners? Inspired by my mom, a government profiler).
I began to write about it. Well, more word-vomit than write, but I started getting something down and it began to consume me, eventually to the point where it transcended my compulsive behavior of checking on these people online.
Then I realized it was simple math. Distraction is obsession, and your obsessions are your material.
In a lecture on essay writing, the author Ann Hood says that in our writing, we need to “say the hardest thing, the thing you think you cannot say, the thing you maybe don’t even know you feel.” I began, in a new work of fiction, to articulate my shame and horror at how I was spiraling into a state of distracted obsession with lives I’d never get to lead. Surely no one else had ever done this. Right?
This fictional journey led me all the way to a speculative novel set in the future, a total departure for someone who’d focused on memoir, essay, and auto-fiction. It grew wild and unwieldy, an entire departure from my experience (which would have been dreadfully boring to read about: Person Sits at Computer for Hours: a memoir), into a world that began to slowly unfurl as I wrote it: mini-drones that record our entire lives for us and play them back as highlight reels, giant ones that deliver packages to window boxes, awards given by the social media company for the best lives, machine-therapists that record your dreams and analyze them for you, whole apartment buildings gone “full ReelBnB” with zero full-time occupants, and, of course, a protagonist who is very, very obsessed with watching certain people “onReel.”
At first I had only the title: The Distractions.
And so, I encourage you to immediately go and write about yours, whatever form that—and they—may take.
Check out Liza Monroy’s The Distractions here:
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