A Locked Door

A few days ago, Steve Rucker invited me to lunch at a small Italian café downtown, near the square, and I was in such a good mood I said absolutely without consulting my dwindling cash supply. For once didn't think about spending money. Dollars are tight, but not so tight I would turn down a steaming plate of spaghetti. Nona's is a narrow building painted white and trimmed in robin's egg blue, with some of the best food in Greene County for under ten dollars inside.

I had just finished up a meeting with my thesis committee chair, Brian Shawver. He read my proposal and gave me ideas for my thesis. Mostly we just sat around and talked. He talked about concerts in Kansas City, old professors of his from the University of Iowa, and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union. We drank some coffee and talked about genre fiction and literary fiction, and the coming Fall semester. He gave me his thoughts on how to build convincing characters, and we talked about several points from his books Aftermath and The Cuban Prospect, and we debated the pros and cons of using tricks to burn a character into the reader's mind.

I left feeling wound up, ready to write, excited to tackle this new novel I'm planning, which is titled Atlantis in the Sands. It would have to wait for Nona's, of course.

When I met up with Steve, we fell to talking. I could listen to people like Brian and Steve talk all day long and never get bored. It came up that I had been reading the new The Atlantic article, "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?"

This article isn't what you think--it's not memory-based, really. But the opening bars struck a chord with me. You see, for a while now I've been feeling less sharp than I was. Not that I'm a genius, you know, just that I wasn't always so flaky. The author, Nicholas Carr, suggests that hyper-links and Internet, while making research easier, is actually altering our brain chemistry, and gives several instances of shortened attention spans, etc. You can read the whole article here and I hope you do.

The answer I had been seeking to my questions ("Why can't I finish what I start?" and "Why is it so hard to focus on writing sometimes?") was right in front of my nose. I knew it had something to do with the article, but I didn't know what. As he often does, Steve pointed this out to me. He's got that built-in, shock-proof shit detector Ernest Hemingway loved so much.

Writing is paying attention to a fictional setting moment by moment, with non-judgmental awareness. In mindfulness, when a mind wanders, you bring it back patiently, time after time. In writing, you have to keep closing the Firefox window with Wikipedia in it. Or Google Earth. Or Merriam-Webster Online. Or all those books you checked out from the library.

Mindfulness is hard enough. Writing, too. So why make it more difficult?

Steve said he always had to write late at night. No music, nothing. He said, "It was like I had to be in a bubble." I said, "I should try that." I thought of Stephen King's locked door, which he says is all-important. A locked door to keep distractions out and to keep the writer in.

Apparently, I sometimes need to lock the door in my head.

When I write now, I refuse to open other windows on the computer, even for research, unless the question is very small and easily answered. An example of that would be "When was T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom published?" Answer: "1935." But for something more complicated, like, "How does a steam engine work on an old train?" I do that research before I start writing. Otherwise, it's too easy to get distracted.

When I got home, I tried locking the door in my head for the first time. I wrote 10 pages, 2,000 words, and I plan to write more next week.