The Internet is Loud

Yes, I know, I'm no famous writer. If you don't know me personally, you've never heard my name. I don't have any awards on my shelf. You can't find my name in publications you've probably read.

Even having had some small glory as a writer on occasion -- if we're equating glory with paycheck size or client prestige -- and generally knowing what the hell I'm talking about when it comes to the craft, I am struggling through the same pitfalls and issues many other struggling writers are. This, I think, is why I feel qualified in some sense to occasionally give writing advice.

There are authors I know personally who have enough of a name they get invited to talk at cons and people ask them for their autograph, and among whom I am naught even a speck upon a speck, whom I think I can offer this advice to as well.

The internet is loud.

Loud is bad for a writer.

And by "loud" I don't mean "too much information" or "too distracting". It is, but that's not the problem.

The problem is "too much information all at once" and "too distracting all the time".

That's "loud".

I realized this today while we were driving along back home from Ely, watching the gloriously cloudy sky with a million rays of light breaking through in every direction, sunlight glowing gold on the green leaves among the towering birch, and a white sunset flashing through the shadowed boughs streaming past.

I had Jen's voice recorder/mp3 player in my pocket, and I'd transferred a couple of short audiobooks to it for the trip, had even listened to one on the way up. I considered listening to another on the way back, but sat and watched and thought instead.

I thought about how Ely was changing, so much looked the same, but there were a lot of differences, some of them strange. There's barely enough young kids now for the one kindergarten class, and many of the older kids are bused to Tower or elsewhere for school. The town feels like it is dying.

There are dust-filled storefronts, the local car lot went out of business (shortly after I bought our van from them), the Hardee's (holding a not insignificant number of teenage memories) has been vacant and empty for years, the town's only theater (where I held my first job) closed due to lack of business...

But there are also new businesses all over -- mostly tourism and wilderness related; clean, modern, eye-catching -- including a high-end home theater store, the local general store moved and expanded to a large lot, the DQ completely remodeled, and so on. So it feels like it's vibrant yet.

It's a very strange study in contrasts.

And I thought about various story ideas I've been batting around now and then, started and stopped, and so forth.

They say "write what you know". Which is good advice. I know Northern Minnesota: pine forests and muck swamps, haunting loons and annoying mosquitoes, fishing opener and deer hunting season, iron mines and tourism, town drunks and too many bars, and quiet millionaires with immense cabins, and everywhere tree-guarded hills of cracked bedrock cupping countless cold lakes, either reaching up or staring down, old, uncaring if-not-for-being inscrutable.

I've never really fit in, but I know the people, too, the culture. I know the grudges and gossip and cruelties, and how they contrast with neighborly spirit, social pleasantries, and the in-born Scandinavian nice -- how it is never clear if the latter is a lie because of the former, or just as real and true, all a part of what life and humanity is.

And how you can't explain it to outsiders, how it isn't capricious or two-faced. Because there's the talk behind closed doors about those jerks, and the fact that you still help shovel those jerks out of the snow or give them a ride into town (and chat all the way about the weather and how the governor is screwing everyone).

Or how everyone just tends to forget about the winter. Or at least I do. Even though it takes up more than half the year, and you can't forget waiting for the snow plows, or the sound of snowmobiles roaring down streets and trails, and fishing shacks like villages on frozen lakes, or shrugging off temperatures like twenty-below-zero because they're normal, and thinking three feet of snow everywhere seems a bit less than usual (let alone the strange winter when you barely saw a foot).

And how all the kids want to grow up and go somewhere else because there's nothing here for them.

But I'm getting away from my point.

Or maybe I'm not.

It's that drive to go somewhere, to be doing something, to be active and engaged, to be finding the future rather than reflecting on the past, connecting with things, that pushes us to be on-line or to be near to being on-line (always at our fingertips). But there is something important to be found in quiet towns of contrast, going nowhere in particular or not able to go anywhere in particular.

Sitting in the car, not talking, not listening to anything, as a passenger, not being able to do much else, I was able to take a break from everything. I was just there and I couldn't be anywhere else for an hour. And it was good. There was something there for me in the nothing.

I hadn't been in the mood to write for quite some time. But just sitting, watching the trees and the sky, not actually thinking about anything in particular, just drifting along with the car as it hummed down the road...fixed that somehow.

Your brain needs a break, to zone out and correlate shit and spin empty fables to itself and to yell loud enough to be heard over all the distracting nonsense the internet, and life in general, provides to keep it busy, distracted, over-informed (and under-thoughtful). Being on-line, on the internet or in life, is like running a marathon in your head non-stop.

And I know authors (and others) who need to back off from the internet because it is eating their productivity or their long-term quality (and they know it, they even admit it occasionally, so I'm not just saying), just like it eats yours and mine. It often just adds to the marathon you're already in, speeds up the pace, doesn't give your brain the time to slow down and just do its thing for a bit without you shoving it this way and that way and making demands of it and pushing it and going, going, going towards some necessary or self-imposed goals...

The internet is loud.

Have it turned off for awhile.

Be quiet somewhere every day or two or three.

Stare at something(s), whatever, but don't analyze. Just notice.

Daydream every day for a while, not so you can write better or write more (because then you're defeating the purpose), but just to get away from being anyone, establishing that sense of filling back up. Which lets you write, regular and thoughtful.

If you can't get yourself stuck somewhere -- as a passenger in a car, or on a train, or wherever, where the only thing you can do is go where you're going and look out the window, and all you can do is relax and daydream for an hour or two -- then go for a walk, without a radio, without an audiobook, without chattering into a cellphone, without a friend, without a magazine, without a notebook, without a virtual reality heads-up-display (or whatever!), without your job/boss/cause/drama/goals tagging along as nagging ghosts.

Go for a walk by yourself, with yourself. Don't ignore the world, let yourself be in the world, without worrying about you in the world. Just be quiet for a bit, inside and outside. (And if you're trying, you're not doing it right; if you're doing, you're wrong.)