Alex Mar talks about how the Internet is invading the writers’ retreat, with predictable and lamentable results.

Residencies have long been the writer’s last defense against the distractions of the outside world. But now the incessant digital static of the Internet, that irresistible force we live in such close, constant contact with, is setting the deep-immersion experience necessary to produce great works of literature against a constant barrage of information. Whenever the work becomes difficult (i.e. every 10 minutes), the Web is there with promises of more barely relevant factoids. 

The MacDowell Colony, the oldest artists’ colony in the United States, opened its doors in 1907, at a time when the biggest technical distractions would have been electric lighting and the telegraph. Of course, you also would have had to deal with the everyday distractions of family, your day job, and all the other stuff we’ve had to balance for centuries. And if you lived in a city, you might also have to deal with incessant noise, horrible smells in the summer, and the prospect of cholera outbreaks. (One day I’ll write a history of distraction and get to the bottom of this– document what it was that people in previous centuries were getting away from, and looking for, when they went on retreat.)

And of course the problem isn’t just that cell towers and wifi access at writers’ retreats are a problem; the same technology that distracts writers is also essential now for professional self-fashioning and self-promotion.

[B]ook marketing now almost always requires the author’s regular engagement with his disembodied fans. Junot Díaz had finally weaned himself off Facebook when his publisher asked him to jump back on to promote This Is How You Lose Her. It had been so hard “to wean myself off the damn e-crack, and here I was jumping back in voluntarily,” he said. “Took only about two days to get right back to my check-it-every-five-seconds cycle.” He went from reading something like a book a week to reading a book a month: a projected total loss of 36 books per year. 

As someone who just created a public author page on Facebook, I can certainly sympathize. I’m just starting to think about how much I want to engage with readers– you don’t want to be aloof, but at the same time if you’re an expert on conquering digital distraction you don’t’ want to fall prey to it yourself!

While at first blush it might seem like the erosion of enforced solitude in writers’ retreats is one of those issues for which the phrase “First World problems” doesn’t convey enough elite privilege, the issue was clarified by an exchange between newly-published author Julian Tepper and the great Philip Roth, recounted in the Paris Review. Tepper, who works at a diner Roth visits, had just given Roth a copy of his new novel– and then:

Roth, who, the world would learn sixteen days later, was retiring from writing, said, in an even tone, with seeming sincerity, “Yeah, this is great. But I would quit while you’re ahead. Really, it’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.”

I managed, “It’s too late, sir. There’s no turning back. I’m in.”

Nodding slowly, he said to me, “Well then, good luck.”

After which I went back to work.

Okay, so that’s a great story, actually, and Tepper tells it well. But then he goes on to say:

I still feel strongly that the one thing a writer has above all else, the reward which is bigger than anything that may come to him after huge advances and Hollywood adaptations, is the weapon against boredom. The question of how to spend his time, what to do today, tomorrow, and during all the other pockets of time in between when some doing is required: this is not applicable to the writer. For he can always lose himself in the act of writing and make time vanish. After which, he actually has something to show for his efforts. Not bad. Very good, in fact. Maybe too romantic a conceit, but this, I believed, was the great prize for being born … an author.

Elizabeth Gilbert was incredulous: “seriously–is writing really all that difficult?”

Yes, of course, it is; I know this personally–but is it that much more difficult than other things? Is it more difficult than working in a steel mill, or raising a child alone, or commuting three hours a day to a deeply unsatisfying cubicle job, or doing laundry in a nursing home, or running a hospital ward, or being a luggage handler, or digging septic systems, or waiting tables at a delicatessen, or–for that matter–pretty much anything else that people do?

Not really, right?

In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and share a little secret about the writing life that nobody likes to admit: Compared to almost every other occupation on earth, it’s f*cking great. I say this as somebody who spent years earning exactly zero dollars for my writing (while waiting tables, like Mr. Tepper) and who now makes many dollars at it. But zero dollars or many dollars, I can honestly say it’s the best life there is, because you get to live within the realm of your own mind, and that is a profoundly rare human privilege.

People who make it as writers are intensely self-directed, and enjoy that part of the work. Now, that doesn’t mean were all reclusive, or that the rest of the business doesn’t interest us: one of the thing I’ve really enjoyed about The Distraction Addiction experience– not the research and writing, but the search for people to blurb the book, the dealing with the marketing and promotions people, the arguments over what the cover art should look like– is that I’ve learned a lot about the industry, about the craft of turning 90,000 words into that object on the table at your local bookstore, and about how low the odds of you succeeding are without a great agent and editor (something I’ve talked about before). For someone who’s spent a lifetime around books, and is no stranger to academic and corporate and magazine writing, it’s been very eye-opening, in a good way.

But ultimately, all the machinery and plans and pitches rely on my ability to get up at 5 AM and write undistracted for a few hours, several days a week, for a couple years; to live in my own mind; to push ideas as far as I possibly can; and, as Tepper puts it, to lose myself in the act of writing and make time vanish– and reemerge at the end of that with words worth keeping. That’s the heart of writing, what has to be preserved at all costs, and what the shiny-blinky attractiveness of the Web threatens.