A writer’s struggle to stay away from social media

Countless books and articles have pointed out the ruinous implications of being online for too long. (Image: Nordwood Themes via Unsplash)

According to the old wisecrack, being a successful writer is 3 percent talent and 97 percent not being distracted by the Internet. Authors may have always had a hard time focusing on their work, but social media, in particular, has made it worse.

In 2016, Andrew Sullivan wrote a powerful piece about his online obsession. Every morning began “with a full immersion in the stream of internet consciousness and news, jumping from site to site, tweet to tweet, breaking news story to hottest take, scanning countless images and videos, catching up with multiple memes”. Sounds uncomfortably familiar.

Sullivan tried to break this habit through constant awareness and meditation retreats, among other things. He feels that “this new epidemic of distraction is our civilisation’s specific weakness”.

Countless other books and articles have pointed out the ruinous implications of being online for too long. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr’s impactful study of what the Internet is doing to our brains, he writes: “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

Writers can take extreme measures to stay in the zone. Jonathan Franzen once said that on some days while working on The Corrections, he locked himself into his East Harlem studio, switched off the lights, and wore earplugs and a blindfold before tapping on his keyboard. Among the less constricting rules laid down by others such as Zadie Smith are: “Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.”

The predicament of a writer planning to work on his manuscript but helplessly drawn online instead is the subject of Jordan Castro’s slim debut novel, The Novelist. The action of the book – if “action” is the right word – occurs early one morning during which the writer tries to develop his work in progress while his partner and dog are asleep in the next room.

Castro has a knack for capturing the ways in which people are lured online like automatons, even as they struggle against the impulse. Every morning, his narrator wakes up with the intention of not checking his social media feed: “with varying degrees of effort and success, I resisted until I half-convinced myself of a legitimate reason to click Twitter, or, in a weak moment, clicked it unthinkingly”. When checking email, “I vaguely sensed, during the one or two seconds it took my Gmail inbox to load, that I was doing something I did not want to do…”

Inevitably, he clicks on, often feverishly, “and if I started in the morning, I would generally continue, unhinged, throughout the day, on both my laptop and my phone, everywhere I went, no matter what else I was doing”. The cursor seems to be independent of his actions, constantly summoning tweets, notifications and replies. “I wanted to work on my novel. What was I doing?”

That is how The Novelist proceeds, with fine-grained attention to the workings of the narrator’s consciousness that combines the heartfelt with the ironic. This quality makes it stand apart from other recent novels about the digital age, such as Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This or Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts.

The morning slips by as the novelist reacts to online goings-on, e-mails a friend, and sporadically turns his attention to the draft of his novel. He obsesses over the style and tense of his fictional account of three days in the life of a character going through heroin withdrawal. In between, he watches YouTube videos featuring an influential writer who, oddly and meta-textually, is also called Jordan Castro.

The twin inspirations of the novel are Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s The Woodcutters. Castro spells this out in so many words, perhaps unnecessarily so – although he cleverly makes his narrator admit the influence.

From Baker, he takes an obsessive attention to the minutiae of everyday life. In this case, preparing and sipping tea and coffee, the shape and texture of kitchen utensils, and even the act of excretion, among other activities. From Bernhard, he borrows the repetitive, rhythmic sentences as well as feelings of savage disdain which he directs towards friends and fellow writers.

Throughout, there are comments on the particularities of social media. Facebook had “always been miserably pointless”, while “Instagram was vanity and Twitter was pride”. The anxiety-ridden writer soldiers on, intermittently reading and revising his manuscript and arriving at some understanding of the correspondences between his circumstances and those of his fictional character.

It's as though Castro has taken to heart the old dictum about the unexamined life not being worth living and decided to probe the nooks and crannies taken for granted. Be it writers or anyone else, our digital lives and the ways we are manipulated online need more scrutiny, whether Twitter implodes, Mastodon explodes or others spring up to take their place.