“Burble, burble, burble” and other confessions from a writer on the road
Hallo, readers!
I’ve been on a million trains hoovering up source materials for Humans and for the next book. This is what happens when you buy a half-price Interrail ticket and, when the travel period comes around, 11 months later, it’s sooner than you might have wished.
As the weeks of on and off the road revolved faster and faster, it seemed as if any attempt to write a newsletter would lead to line after line of “burble, burble, burble”. Bandwidth is only so wide. Trains, train strikes, library and museum opening hours, and legs aching from too much gallery-standing and bag-dragging take a toll.
Let’s see if I can get back on track. Baby steps…
The accidental focus machine
Between 2003 and 2009, I had a magnificent PC laptop (really!) with a tiny brain. Well, the brain wasn’t tiny at the start. Indeed, it was the biggest brain I could find. But the brains of new machines seemed to double in size and processing power every few many months.
I had spent two weeks researching options before plumping for what was basically a gaming laptop built in Warwickshire, UK. Steely blue like a mako shark and weighing about as much, my Rock (the brand) laptop was both large and relatively square in shape, with a tall screen — a boon for paws, posture, and peering at pictures.
Within a few years, however, Sprocket (my laptop) became rather slow at the internet. Once or even twice a day, its anti-virus software would decree that it was Time To Update. Not even typing in Word could proceed at a regular pace while updating was happening.
Being on the internet became something I did because I had to, not because I wanted to. This was in the earliest social media days (certainly before I was on the platforms, as I was a late and suspicious adopter).
By 2008, I didn’t even bother turning on the internet router (!) until I’d done a couple of hours’ writing first thing in the morning. Then I would turn it on for the 45-minute slowdown while the virus software updated, have a long coffee break, return to Sprocket, do some internet stuff, TURN OFF THE WIFI, and continue with the dissertation.
Online tasks got saved up for doing a couple of times a day. In the weeks running up to the end of dissertation writing (in late 2008/2009, as the banks collapsed), I had to buy my next laptop (a Mac, and ever since) to go onto the internet efficiently to check stuff, but finished the thesis on the trusty Sprocket.
What this internet irritation in the early years of mildly addictive things online means for me now is that I have strong memories of concentrating deeply and differently from how I began concentrating a few years later.
I started a postdoc in fall 2009 and organized a couple of conferences: suddenly I had obligations to my Inbox. Email took priority over everything else. Then there was the academic job search, and the frantic checking of email and the jobs wiki. At one point I noticed that I was checking the wiki every five minutes. It was futile but hard to stop. My brain seemed to be as fractured as a crystal ball dropped on the floor.
I crossed the Atlantic for a job in 2012, and suddenly beginning using social media to keep in touch with people. At times I wondered, several times an hour, who was chatting about what. Even if I wasn’t opening anything, social media was at the back of my mind, an anti-loneliness cookie and new community building tool. I loved scrolling through and reading people’s posts in the days before algorithms. But the memory of better concentration with the wifi off for hours on end never quite left me.
I can still enter that zone of deeper focus, with a little preparation. My notes to self:
First, spend some time away from the internet by, say, sleeping (at night), going out for a brisk walk, or chatting or hanging out with friends. With the internet safely out of short-term memory, spend a fixed length of time on one writing or non-internet research task (around 90 mins, or 3-4 tomatoes for tomato-counters).
By this point, the internet is pretty much forgotten, but the memory for deep, focused work has create its own momentum. I can stay in this zone, re-enter it after a break, or re-enter the zone straight after doing any essential online stuff. Each new day wipes the memory banks clean of the desire to skate around for shiny things online rather than reading/doing whatever I am doing, on the internet or otherwise, in a more focused way.
The writing software Scrivener has a Composition mode, one in which the text you’re writing looks like a photograph of a sheet of paper on a black background: no toolbars, no battery-life icon, no clock, NO WIFI ICON! If I spend a while there, I don’t even want to check the time on my computer, which is at once weird and wonderful.
But none of this sticks! Neuroplasticity apparently cuts both ways. If I become complacent and assume that I have cracked the no-distractions code, I become careless with the routine. Then I’m fighting the temptation to, say, look at the front page of a newspaper online, barf, shut it again, and continue working with less focus than before - all without actually reading anything in the paper properly.
So… the words above were written in one sitting without opening the internet (I think). They were also written while feeling tired, with multiple things on my mind. I’ve just realized that I’ve also been subconsciously raising the bar on myself on each newsletter. This makes it harder to begin one, or even to turn one of my many already half-written newsletter ideas into a full newsletter.
You can guess the internal monologue: “what if the essay isn’t great? Shouldn’t I research a museum object before posting about it? I’m too tired to be fun! Which thing shall I write about?” It’s all very well writing when there are no distractions, on the internet or in real life.
But waiting for a non-tired, non-over-busy, non-sleepy moment to write the latest, “perfect” newsletter - a moment in which I think I have something super-original to say that is going to appear with no effort - is not how writing usually happens, even if one gets lucky sometimes.
And, now, magically, there is a newsletter.
The next baby step will be to return to writing more regularly about some of the things I’ve seen, read, and eaten of late. And as the travel draws to a close when this month ends, normal service should be easier to resume.
Book news
This summer’s main writing goal is to return a revised version of HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY to my editor by the fall. I have lots of useful readers’ comments to work through, and new material collected on the road. The trick is to make the task manageable, and to not become overwhelmed by the possibilities.
What are your favourite manuscript revision hacks? Feel free to drop them in the comments section.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).