Susan Conley's Blog, page 3

Selling A Book Before You’ve Finished It: A Lesson in Stubbornness

When I went out into the publishing market four years ago, I had a newfound agent, an incredible amount of naivete, and two book manuscripts for sale: a China memoir about the years my young boys and husband and I lived in Beijing, and a novel manuscript about a woman finding love in Paris. I’d had the good luck to sign an agent who believed in both my books. Not every agent who was interested in my memoir was interested in my novel. One agent was keen on the novel and not so much on the memoir. But I believed in both books. Deeply. Desperately maybe. I couldn’t sort of forego one at the expense of the other. So I needed to trust myself to find an agent who would stand behind both projects. I kept talking to agents---I reached out to a dozen and talked to a half-dozen and then I found the fit—a woman who understood both my book projects and was behind them entirely.

The memoir had to be tinkered with after we sold it. But the novel was inchoate. There was a plot, yes sort of, and some characters, but it was unclear what anyone was really doing or what their motives were, or how I could create a rich story out of the material I’d put on the page. In short, I’d sold a book I hadn’t finished yet. The China memoir had almost written itself, its scenes arrived in my head fully formed every day, and all I had to do was transcribe them to the page. Not so the novel.

The novel had to be conceived and reconceived. Selling it before it was done began to feel like I was walking a tightrope between my most ambitious hopes for the novel and the hard cold reality that I had to finish the thing. And soon. I was so grateful to have sold it. But I felt building pressure to complete it. And could I finish it anywhere near on time? Could I even finish it? Friends in the publishing business—writers— kept saying, it doesn’t matter whether you hit your deadline or not. What matters is that you write the best book you can. I listened and nodded at them and then continued my long, steady panic. Could I handle the pressure of not knowing how the novel would end or even where it was headed? Maybe I could just call the whole thing off.

What happened is that I didn’t hit any of my deadlines. They passed. Then they passed again. But I trusted my editor. She believed in the book and what I was really trying to do with it. And I slowly learned to trust myself and this idea that I’d know when the book was really ready, which is what finally happened last fall. As I write this here at the start of the countdown to my novel’s launch, it’s a reminder to us all to be stubborn about our writing. To stay the course and get to the desk and put the time in. To believe in our projects and find people who believe in them. Even if that takes months or years.

Sometimes I subtitle the writing workshops I teach, “seminars in stubbornness.” I really believe that getting to the desk and working through the mess that is any first draft, has a great deal to do with being stubborn. It’s much more about stubbornness than talent. Once you have material (for me it was a very wobbly first draft of my novel) there’s some comfort. Because you’ve got something to work off of or against on the page. Even if you ditch the whole first draft, it’s because you are in conversation with the material and have reached the realization that there’s a better way than that first way you tried. I always believe it’s better to be talking to the words on the page than to have no words to talk to.

There were many better ways to tell the stories of my novel than the angles that I started out with. I did a lot of the structural tap dancing you hear about: changing the novel from present tense to past and then back. Moving from a third person limited point of view to a first-person narrator. I got to know the novel through its iterations. I got to know my editor. And she got to understand what I really most hoped and wanted for the novel.

Do I recommend trying to sell a novel before it’s done? I’m not sure I can vouch for your mental sanity if you do it. But what I can attest to is the power of the process of writing a book. Any book—whether you self-publish or put it in a desk for a couple years to get some space from it or sell it in a country like Macedonia where you do not speak the language. The trick is to stay true to the impetus behind the book—the reasons you wrote it in the first place. Because when we strip away the plot and characters, what we are left with is the heart of the thing—the whole emotional underpinnings of the book. If we stay true to this notion of heart—of emotional connection—then maybe we can remain stubborn and stand up for our books and for our creative process out there in the noisy world that is publishing these days.


The SheWrites community have very kindly invited me to do a blog a week in the six-week countdown to the publication of my new novel, Paris Was The Place. This blog is the second in the series.

Selling A Book Before You’ve Finished It: A Lesson in Stubbornness

When I went out into the publishing market four years ago, I had a newfound agent, an incredible amount of naivete, and two book manuscripts for sale: a China memoir about the years my young boys and husband and I lived in Beijing, and a novel manuscript about a woman finding love in Paris. I’d had the good luck to sign an agent who believed in both my books. Not every agent who was interested in my memoir was interested in my novel. One agent was keen on the novel and not so much on the memoir. But I believed in both books. Deeply. Desperately maybe. I couldn’t sort of forego one at the expense of the other. So I needed to trust myself to find an agent who would stand behind both projects. I kept talking to agents---I reached out to a dozen and talked to a half-dozen and then I found the fit—a woman who understood both my book projects and was behind them entirely.

The memoir had to be tinkered with after we sold it. But the novel was inchoate. There was a plot, yes sort of, and some characters, but it was unclear what anyone was really doing or what their motives were, or how I could create a rich story out of the material I’d put on the page. In short, I’d sold a book I hadn’t finished yet. The China memoir had almost written itself, its scenes arrived in my head fully formed every day, and all I had to do was transcribe them to the page. Not so the novel.

The novel had to be conceived and reconceived. Selling it before it was done began to feel like I was walking a tightrope between my most ambitious hopes for the novel and the hard cold reality that I had to finish the thing. And soon. I was so grateful to have sold it. But I felt building pressure to complete it. And could I finish it anywhere near on time? Could I even finish it? Friends in the publishing business—writers— kept saying, it doesn’t matter whether you hit your deadline or not. What matters is that you write the best book you can. I listened and nodded at them and then continued my long, steady panic. Could I handle the pressure of not knowing how the novel would end or even where it was headed? Maybe I could just call the whole thing off.

What happened is that I didn’t hit any of my deadlines. They passed. Then they passed again. But I trusted my editor. She believed in the book and what I was really trying to do with it. And I slowly learned to trust myself and this idea that I’d know when the book was really ready, which is what finally happened last fall. As I write this here at the start of the countdown to my novel’s launch, it’s a reminder to us all to be stubborn about our writing. To stay the course and get to the desk and put the time in. To believe in our projects and find people who believe in them. Even if that takes months or years.

Sometimes I subtitle the writing workshops I teach, “seminars in stubbornness.” I really believe that getting to the desk and working through the mess that is any first draft, has a great deal to do with being stubborn. It’s much more about stubbornness than talent. Once you have material (for me it was a very wobbly first draft of my novel) there’s some comfort. Because you’ve got something to work off of or against on the page. Even if you ditch the whole first draft, it’s because you are in conversation with the material and have reached the realization that there’s a better way than that first way you tried. I always believe it’s better to be talking to the words on the page than to have no words to talk to.

There were many better ways to tell the stories of my novel than the angles that I started out with. I did a lot of the structural tap dancing you hear about:  changing the novel from present tense to past and then back. Moving from a third person limited point of view to a first-person narrator.  I got to know the novel through its iterations. I got to know my editor. And she got to understand what I really most hoped and wanted for the novel.

Do I recommend trying to sell a novel before it’s done? I’m not sure I can vouch for your mental sanity if you do it. But what I can attest to is the power of the process of writing a book. Any book—whether you self-publish or put it in a desk for a couple years to get some space from it or sell it in a country like Macedonia where you do not speak the language. The trick is to stay true to the impetus behind the book—the reasons you wrote it in the first place. Because when we strip away the plot and characters, what we are left with is the heart of the thing—the whole emotional underpinnings of the book. If we stay true to this notion of heart—of emotional connection—then maybe we can remain stubborn and stand up for our books and for our creative process out there in the noisy world that is publishing these days.

 

The She Writes community have very kindly invited me to do a blog a week in the six-week countdown to the publication of my new novel, Paris Was The Place. This blog is the second in the series.

(Photo credit: Bellini Crossing Niagara River On a Tight Rope by photographer George Barker, 1844-1894, courtesy Wiki Commons.) 

 

In Celebration of Sentences

Last year the Indian American fiction writer, Jumpha Lahiri, wrote a beautiful ode to the act of writing for the New York Times. It took the form of an essay in which she confessed her fierce ardor for sentences and the amazing work sentences do and how novels are in many ways carried by sentences and “consist of nothing but” sentences.

I love this essay. I love it for its distillation of the act of writing and for the way it calls out sentences and celebrates them and names them as the building blocks of the whole enterprise.

Then there comes a day when we have to give our sentences away. To editors. To readers. The day, Lahiri writes, “When a book is finally out of my hands I feel bereft… A complex root system, extracted.” This the line that still echoes for me long after I’ve put Lahiri’s essay down—the part about feeling bereft. I know that part.

For me it started back in January when I handed in copy edits for my new novel Paris Was the Place, and began readying myself for the day (August 6th—six weeks from now) when Knopf will publish it. There was the sensation of being lost after I turned in those final pages. At sea. But I’m pretty much done with bereft at this point. Now I’m honing in on reading dates and guest blogs. But I still recognize that a kind of extraction has taken place—a letting go of an ecosystem that I tended to and watered daily for years.

We inhabit our stories. We live inside our characters’ heads when we’re writing them. Leaving these people and places can be a tricky undertaking. Fraught even. It was for me. But last week I got an unexpected gift that made giving my novel up to the publishing Gods a little easier.

It came in the form of a message from an actress in Los Angeles named Cassandra. She was recording the audio book of Paris Was the Place, and she wrote to tell me that now she is the one inside my characters’ heads. She said she felt like she’d already lived the life of Willie Pears, my main character, who fled to Paris in 1989 to hang out with her crazy brother. And Cassandra said she was falling in love with Macon, the passionate French lawyer in the novel, and she was grieving for Luke, Willie’s brother, when he got really sick. Cassandra was the first reader to fully inhabit my novel’s sentences. A root system might have been extracted from me when I turned the novel over to my editor, but wasn’t that what I wanted? To share the place and the people?

With this book launch of mine, I’ve realized I need different sentences—ones to talk about my book with. Ones that explain what my book’s about. It’s a new distillation that I’m just now getting used to. My novel is a story about how we reinvent family wherever we go. It’s about falling madly, deeply in love in France and about letting go. It’s about the power of words to accrue into sentences and it’s about the emotional connection between those sentences on the page—all those sentences—and the reader. I was bereft at first to see the pages go, but now that I’m so close to publication, it feels sort of as if the sentences are coming back home.

The She Writes community have very kindly invited me to do a blog a week in the six-week countdown to the publication of my new novel, Paris Was The Place. This blog is the first in the series.

In Celebration of Sentences

Last year the Indian American fiction writer, Jumpha Lahiri, wrote a beautiful ode to the act of writing for the New York Times. It took the form of an essay in which she confessed her fierce ardor for sentences and the amazing work sentences do and how novels are in many ways carried by sentences and “consist of nothing but” sentences. I love this essay. I love it for its distillation of the act of writing and for the way it calls out sentences and celebrates them and names them as the building blocks of the whole enterprise.

Then there comes a day when we have to give our sentences away. To editors. To readers. The day, Lahiri writes, “When a book is finally out of my hands I feel bereft… A complex root system, extracted.” This the line that still echoes for me long after I’ve put Lahiri’s essay down—the part about feeling bereft. I know that part.

For me it started back in January when I handed in copy edits for my new novel Paris Was the Place, and began readying myself for the day (August 6th—six weeks from now) when Knopf will publish it. There was the sensation of being lost after I turned in those final pages. At sea. But I’m pretty much done with bereft at this point. Now I’m honing in on reading dates and guest blogs. But I still recognize that a kind of extraction has taken place—a letting go of an ecosystem that I tended to and watered daily for years.

We inhabit our stories. We live inside our characters’ heads when we’re writing them. Leaving these people and places can be a tricky undertaking. Fraught even. It was for me. But last week I got an unexpected gift that made giving my novel up to the publishing Gods a little easier.

It came in the form of a message from an actress in Los Angeles named Cassandra. She was recording the audio book of Paris Was the Place, and she wrote to tell me that now she is the one inside my characters’ heads. She said she felt like she’d already lived the life of Willie Pears, my main character, who fled to Paris in 1989 to hang out with her crazy brother. And Cassandra said she was falling in love with Macon, the passionate French lawyer in the novel, and she was grieving for Luke, Willie’s brother, when he got really sick. Cassandra was the first reader to fully inhabit my novel’s sentences. A root system might have been extracted from me when I turned the novel over to my editor, but wasn’t that what I wanted? To share the place and the people?

With this book launch of mine, I’ve realized I need different sentences—ones to talk about my book with. Ones that explain what my book’s about. It’s a new distillation that I’m just now getting used to. My novel is a story about how we reinvent family wherever we go. It’s about falling madly, deeply in love in France and about letting go. It’s about the power of words to accrue into sentences and it’s about the emotional connection between those sentences on the page—all those sentences—and the reader. I was bereft at first to see the pages go, but now that I’m so close to publication, it feels sort of as if the sentences are coming back home.

The She Writes community have very kindly invited me to do a blog a week in the six-week countdown to the publication of my new novel, Paris Was The Place. This blog is the first in the series. 

 

  

Traveling from Memoir to Novel: This Time the Narrator isn’t Me

Five years ago I moved to China with my husband, two young boys and a mess of a book manuscript that’s recently become my forthcoming novel. Today the book is called Paris Was the Place, and it will come out with Knopf next July. But back in China I think it was titled The Shape of a Boy. I can’t be sure because it changed titles so many times during its short life. It also changed verb tense and point of view (from first person to third and back to first) and plot structure—just to name a few.

I began working on another draft of the novel as soon as we moved into our Beijing high rise. But it was like trying to write fiction in outer space. The novel is set in central Paris in the late 1980’s, which came to feel about as far away from downtown Beijing as the moon. It was difficult for me to get any narrative footing while I wrote in China. I ended up arriving at a discursive first-person voice that I thought would solve all the novel’s problems. But what this meant was a book that moved back and forth in time far too quickly, with chapters that sat like unanchored prose poems.

Then something great happened to my novel while I was in China: I wrote a memoir. The memoir was about what it meant to live on the far side of the world, grappling with Mandarin and a stealth case of breast cancer. My novel got pushed far over to the side, or rather to the bottom drawer of my China desk, where it sat for the next two years.

What my memoir kindly did was teach me how to write story. Simple, chronological, authentic story. It also taught me how to stay in the scenes longer and to wait it out until all the good stuff—the tension between characters and the nuance and the compassion—rose to the top. Truth be told, my memoir sort of wrote itself—I certainly worked hard at it, but the material for the book offered itself to me and I knew it cold: the mouth-watering Beijing dumpling houses, the ancient Buddhist Temples and the zooey Beijing surgery for a breast cancer I didn’t believe I had.

I learned how to put myself into my memoir and to write with an intimate voice, as if I was talking to a very close friend. I finished it and published it, while my novel waited in the desk drawer patiently. When I finally turned to the novel, it had my full attention. By then I understood that much of good writing is about conflict. So where was the conflict in my novel? And why was its chronology a mess? I rewrote the book again and threw out a whole lot of stuff—trying to create the intimate voice that I’d been able to arrive at in my memoir.

But this time the narrator was not me. Who was she? Her name was Willie Pears and I could see her in my mind on a train in France. I could watch her get on a plane in Paris and fly to Delhi. But I couldn’t fully get inside her head. Getting to know her took time. My editor likened it to breaking down an emotional wall.

Memoir had proved itself to be a clean marriage of form and content for me. But there was such an abundance of choice in writing the novel that it was heady. I had to let the characters loose on their own. I had to trust them and trust that the novel would find its own emotional breakthroughs. I got myself to the chair at my desk and generated material. But life kept interrupting, especially in the form of those two young boys of mine. I gained on Willie Pears in increments. She asked me to be more open to her than I’d ever been to any character—including myself. Then she began to live on the edges of my imagination—when I went to bed, when I woke in the middle of night, while I walked the boys to school.

The emotional wall that my editor had been trying to get me to scale finally came down. I understood Willie’s motivations, even if I didn’t always agree with her. And this is how I gave myself over to my novel. Willie Pears isn’t me. She didn’t hike in the Tibetan Plateau in Yunnan Province or teach writing workshops to Chinese nationals who are still nostalgic for Mao. She’s thirty years old, fierce about Pablo Neruda poems, and teaches refugee girls at an asylum center in Paris’s 10th arrondisement. In order to fully meet her, I needed to leave the land of memoir behind and trust this place called fiction.

Traveling from Memoir to Novel: This Time the Narrator isn’t Me

Five years ago I moved to China with my husband, two young boys and a mess of a book manuscript that’s recently become my forthcoming novel. Today the book is called Paris Was the Place, and it will come out with Knopf next July. But back in China I think it was titled The Shape of a Boy. I can’t be sure because it changed titles so many times during its short life. It also changed verb tense and point of view (from first person to third and back to first) and plot structure—just to name a few.

I began working on another draft of the novel as soon as we moved into our Beijing high rise. But it was like trying to write fiction in outer space. The novel is set in central Paris in the late 1980’s, which came to feel about as far away from downtown Beijing as the moon. It was difficult for me to get any narrative footing while I wrote in China. I ended up arriving at a discursive first-person voice that I thought would solve all the novel’s problems. But what this meant was a book that moved back and forth in time far too quickly, with chapters that sat like unanchored prose poems.

Then something great happened to my novel while I was in China:  I wrote a memoir. The memoir was about what it meant to live on the far side of the world, grappling with Mandarin and a stealth case of breast cancer. My novel got pushed far over to the side, or rather to the bottom drawer of my China desk, where it sat for the next two years.

What my memoir kindly did was teach me how to write story. Simple, chronological, authentic story. It also taught me how to stay in the scenes longer and to wait it out until all the good stuff—the tension between characters and the nuance and the compassion—rose to the top. Truth be told, my memoir sort of wrote itself—I certainly worked hard at it, but the material for the book offered itself to me and I knew it cold:  the mouth-watering Beijing dumpling houses, the ancient Buddhist Temples and the zooey Beijing surgery for a breast cancer I didn’t believe I had.

I learned how to put myself into my memoir and to write with an intimate voice, as if I was talking to a very close friend. I finished it and published it, while my novel waited in the desk drawer patiently. When I finally turned to the novel, it had my full attention. By then I understood that much of good writing is about conflict. So where was the conflict in my novel? And why was its chronology a mess? I rewrote the book again and threw out a whole lot of stuff—trying to create the intimate voice that I’d been able to arrive at in my memoir.

But this time the narrator was not me. Who was she? Her name was Willie Pears and I could see her in my mind on a train in France. I could watch her get on a plane in Paris and fly to Delhi. But I couldn’t fully get inside her head. Getting to know her took time. My editor likened it to breaking down an emotional wall.

Memoir had proved itself to be a clean marriage of form and content for me. But there was such an abundance of choice in writing the novel that it was heady. I had to let the characters loose on their own. I had to trust them and trust that the novel would find its own emotional breakthroughs. I got myself to the chair at my desk and generated material. But life kept interrupting, especially in the form of those two young boys of mine. I gained on Willie Pears in increments. She asked me to be more open to her than I’d ever been to any character—including myself. Then she began to live on the edges of my imagination—when I went to bed, when I woke in the middle of night, while I walked the boys to school.

The emotional wall that my editor had been trying to get me to scale finally came down. I understood Willie’s motivations, even if I didn’t always agree with her. And this is how I gave myself over to my novel. Willie Pears isn’t me. She didn’t hike in the Tibetan Plateau in Yunnan Province or teach writing workshops to Chinese nationals who are still nostalgic for Mao. She’s thirty years old, fierce about Pablo Neruda poems, and teaches refugee girls at an asylum center in Paris’s 10th arrondisement. In order to fully meet her, I needed to leave the land of memoir behind and trust this place called fiction.

 

Photo credit: North sidewalk of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris, at dawn, by Benh Lieu Song, courtesy Wikipedia Commons

My TEDx Talk

I was thrilled to give a TEDx Talk last month about how storytelling changed my life and changes the lives of the kids we teach at The Telling Room! You can click here to take a look.

We believe children are natural born storytellers and that writing gives kids access to an emotional literacy that sets them up for all kinds of future success. I'm grateful to you if you pass this clip on to other writers and educators and people passionate about kids!

TEDx Talk

I was thrilled to give a TEDx Talk last month about how storytelling changed my life and changes the lives of the kids we teach at The Telling Room! You can click here to take a look.

We believe children are natural born storytellers and that writing gives kids access to an emotional literacy that sets them up for all kinds of future success. I'm grateful to you if you pass this clip on to other writers and educators and people passionate about kids!  

My Smartphone Future

Before I went to bed last night I read an article in the New York Times about a convoy of people in the States who are eschewing Smartphones. It was written by a journalist named Teddy Wayne. And yes. Instead of I-phones or Blackberries or watchamacallits, Wayne reports that many folks he’s talked to recently have bought old-fashioned cell phones that do two simple things: make calls and receive them. And boy are these people happy about it.

For a long time the idea of an old-fashioned cell phone has been sounding like a big relief to me. Because for an even longer time I’ve been feeling way too tied to an endless stream of pretty unimportant emails that appear on my Smartphone. I read these emails while I’m walking the dog. I read them while the pasta is boiling. I read them while my kids do their homework.

Why do I read them? I can’t really answer that. Because none of these emails is ever that urgent. I mean sure, there are work-related book emails that come in and teaching emails that need answering, but I can get to those in due time when I’m at a desk and I’ve put aside the time to actually answer emails.

The sneaky thing that my Smartphones does is make me feel like every hour of every day is the absolutely most perfect time in the world to get my email. Except it’s not. It’s really time to make the red sauce. Or time to read Aidan a chapter from the Percy Jackson Series. Or time to throw a stick to the puppy.

So for months I’ve been feeling stuck—I’ve got this snazzy Smartphone, and I should probably use it. And I’ve also been feeling a little worried—what is this phone doing to my brain anyway? Why do I have this email compulsion?

Around 9 pm I got to the line in Wayne’s piece about how Smartphones create a false need to constantly check our online life. Wayne sites a writer named Nicholas Carr who wrote a book called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Carr says Smartphones are making us better at multi-tasking but hurting our ability to sustain focus. Yikes.

And I’d been feeling scattered. I’d been feeling like all my thoughts were light. This could just be me. I can sadly be very light. So maybe it’s not the Smartphone’s fault, but Carr says that because of these phones, all of us “stop having opportunities to be alone with our thoughts, something that used to come naturally.” Double yikes.

Then I read the part in the article where the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer says he noticed a dramatic change in his ability to focus on his writing after he ditched his Smartphone. I felt a tingly sensation in my arms. I knew I was going to have to throw my Smartphone away too. Or give it to someone. My husband, I decided. I’ll give it to Tony because he actually NEEDS a Smartphone, and I do not. He is the one talking to China all day and making elaborate business plans. I am sitting at a desk in the attic, writing a novel about a poetry lover in France.

Then I had a dream after I finished the article. It went like this: I drove my car to Boston from Portland, Maine and took the wrong exit on the Tobin Bridge and ended up on a car ferry to New Bedford. I don’t think there even is a car ferry to New Bedford, but I was sitting on a vinyl white couch in a compartment that was completely enclosed like a submarine without windows, or a high-speed European train. Jonathan Franzen was sitting next to me. We talked. He said he’d thrown his Smartphone away too, just like the other novelist named Jonathan with the last name I don’t know how to pronounce.

The fact that both the Jonathans had been strong enough to walk away from their Smartphones made me feel enormously hopeful in my dream. Then I woke up. Where was I? And where was my car? Why had I taken that exit to New Bedford? The sun came up. My mind cleared. I trotted downstairs to make my children pancakes. My Smartphone was sitting on its little stand on the kitchen counter waiting for me. Calling to me.

Neither of the Jonathans had told me how hard it would be to walk away from my Smartphone. I could tell now that it was going to be trickier than I thought. I have a compulsion after all. My Smartphone has messed with neurons in my brain. But I am a stubborn one. Once I put my mind to something I don’t stop til I get there, and now I want my brain back please.

My Smartphone Future

Before I went to bed last night I read an article in the New York Times about a convoy of people in the States who are eschewing Smartphones. It was written by a journalist named Teddy Wayne. And yes. Instead of I-phones or Blackberries or watchamacallits, Wayne reports that many folks he's talked to recently have bought old-fashioned cell phones that do two simple things:  make calls and receive them. And boy are these people happy about it.

For a long time the idea of an old-fashioned cell phone has been sounding like a big relief to me. Because for an even longer time I've been feeling way too tied to an endless stream of pretty unimportant emails that appear on my Smartphone. I read these emails while I'm walking the dog. I read them while the pasta is boiling. I read them while my kids do their homework.

Why do I read them? I can't really answer that. Because none of these emails is ever that urgent. I mean sure, there are work-related book emails that come in and teaching emails that need answering, but I can get to those in due time when I'm at a desk and I've put aside the time to actually answer emails.

The sneaky thing that my Smartphones does is make me feel like every hour of every day is the absolutely most perfect time in the world to get my email. Except it's not. It's really time to make the red sauce. Or time to read Aidan a chapter from the Percy Jackson Series. Or time to throw a stick to the puppy.

So for months I've been feeling stuck—I've got this snazzy Smartphone, and I should probably use it. And I've also been feeling a little worried—what is this phone doing to my brain anyway? Why do I have this email compulsion?

Around 9 pm I got to the line in Wayne's piece about how Smartphones create a false need to constantly check our online life. Wayne sites a writer named Nicholas Carr who wrote a book called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Carr says Smartphones are making us better at multi-tasking but hurting our ability to sustain focus. Yikes.

And I'd been feeling scattered. I'd been feeling like all my thoughts were light. This could just be me. I can sadly be very light. So maybe it's not the Smartphone's fault, but Carr says that because of these phones, all of us "stop having opportunities to be alone with our thoughts, something that used to come naturally."  Double yikes.

Then I read the part in the article where the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer says he noticed a dramatic change in his ability to focus on his writing after he ditched his Smartphone. I felt a tingly sensation in my arms. I knew I was going to have to throw my Smartphone away too. Or give it to someone. My husband, I decided. I'll give it to Tony because he actually NEEDS a Smartphone, and I do not.  He is the one talking to China all day and making elaborate business plans. I am sitting at a desk in the attic, writing a novel about a poetry lover in France.

Then I had a dream after I finished the article. It went like this:  I drove my car to Boston from Portland, Maine and took the wrong exit on the Tobin Bridge and ended up on a car ferry to New Bedford. I don't think there even is a car ferry to New Bedford, but I was sitting on a vinyl white couch in a compartment that was completely enclosed like a submarine without windows, or a high-speed European train. Jonathan Franzen was sitting next to me. We talked. He said he'd thrown his Smartphone away too, just like the other novelist named Jonathan with the last name I don't know how to pronounce.

The fact that both the Jonathans had been strong enough to walk away from their Smartphones made me feel enormously hopeful in my dream. Then I woke up. Where was I? And where was my car? Why had I taken that exit to New Bedford? The sun came up. My mind cleared. I trotted downstairs to make my children pancakes. My Smartphone was sitting on its little stand on the kitchen counter waiting for me. Calling to me.

Neither of the Jonathans had told me how hard it would be to walk away from my Smartphone. I could tell now that it was going to be trickier than I thought. I have a compulsion after all. My Smartphone has messed with neurons in my brain. But I am a stubborn one. Once I put my mind to something I don't stop til I get there, and now I want my brain back please.

 

(Photo credit: Robert Fludd, 1619, courtesy Wiki Commons)