Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
Every time somebody says to me, "It's so impressive how you manage to get writing done despite being on Facebook/Twitter/etc. all the time," I cringe. I've been hit by a backhanded compliment. I'm surfing, tweeting and emailing — leaving my digital prints everywhere and probably picking up some nasty computer viruses — while serious writers are working pristinely, heroically beyond the clutches of the Internet.
Jonathan Franzen found the Internet such a threat that he disabled it by plugging an Ethernet cable into his computer with super glue. The philosophy behind this act of almost rageful vandalism seems self-evident. Compared to the hard work of writing, the Internet gives an easy way out. Before, the writer took breaks for things like coffee, cigarettes, drugs — items that each have natural limits in the human body. But now, you're basically working in an intellectual red-light district where, at any time — every three seconds if you want — you can dip into the constantly replenished streams of email/Facebook/Gawker/eBay/YouTube/Instagram.
When you're done, you have a snazzy pair of new shoes and have laughed at a lot of cat videos but are bereft of well-crafted sentences. At least — so the theory goes. Even more alarmingly, others warn, your lack of self-control might damage your brain permanently. In "The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember," the tech journalist Nicholas Carr warns that the Internet can rewire our brains to prefer information in "short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts" instead of the long and steady and linear presentations that characterize deep reading.
I came of age as a writer in the '90s, when the Internet was often not worth the hassle to access — you had to tie up the phone line, and once there, you'd be stuck typing out extremely long URLs that would lead you to marginal websites with hard-to-read fonts. My writing reflected its minimal presence: I recently donated my first novel's research materials for a collection, and what I sent them was hundreds of pages of documents, books, a pile of Life magazines, newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, a box of audiotapes and reporters' notebooks filled with notes. No list of URLs.
In the last eight years of my current novel, however, I have stumbled into the age of Wi-Fi and Google. At first, I made valiant efforts to spurn this new, faster, easier-to-use Internet. After all, George Eliot wrote "Middlemarch" — on which my novel is loosely based — without it, right? I even became an early adopter of a (then) free software program called Freedom, which blocks Internet access in a way that's more reversible than super glue.
I also maintained my intuitive preference for the hard copy. My tools include cluttered shelves groaning with books and magazines, a bulletin board shingled with post-its and my coup de grâce: a Brobdingnagian three-ring binder whose pages are pasted with whatever research, writing bits and random ephemera I've decided to collect — the binder itself is probably Tolstoyan novel-length or more.
But even with these preferences, I have come to realize that my writing brain has been waiting for something exactly like today's dizzyingly overfull, warp-speed Internet.
The World Wide Web is uncurated, which means that there are a million, zillion data points of light out there (Google was indeed named for the number "googol"— 10 to the 100th power). At any given moment, 99.9 percent of it is extraneous, irrelevant, but that's exactly what I need: an endless pool in which to wallow and do the backstroke.
I work via slow accretions of often seemingly unrelated stuff. When I complete that unwieldy, puzzling first draft, I spread it out on the desk like a soothsayer viewing entrails, and try to find patterns. If asked, I might pretty up my process and call it bricolage or intellectual scrapbooking, but it really is merely the result of a magpie mind/brain, one that flits from one shiny thing to another. While I still work in my plodding way, the ever renewing bits of information in my Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds provide endless fodder, like going shell collecting on the beach on a normal day versus the day after a hurricane when the ocean has burped up every interesting bit of stuff imaginable.
What keeps my writing process slow is not the Web, but the need to spend so much time circling a scene or a character, trying to get it in a form that reflects what I see in my mind. The payoff often comes when some trifle — say, an article on Inuit recipes for fermented salmon heads — that I've clicked on for no discernible reason, can years later become the perfect thing for a character musing on his long-ago romantic summer job in a cannery in Alaska. And while I still have epiphanic moments while staring out my window like a proper author, or am inspired by a long article in the New York Review of Books, I am just as often prompted by a random bit I've gleaned on a friend's Twitter feed as it speeds by, or the latest ha-ha list from BuzzFeed.
It became my guilty secret that a foray into Wikipedia, Gawker, Twitter and even eBay (an absolute font of consumer and postconsumer culture) could set my mind rolling. Seemingly unrelated bits, like what looks like random bumps on a player-piano roll, would, when put in the right part of my brain, create actual music.
But the backhanded complimenters also want to know, what about all the creative juices I divert to the writing of the useless 140-character tweets and Facebook updates? Mr. Franzen, not surprisingly, says Twitter represents "Everything I oppose" (I'm pretty sure I read that article online after a friend tweeted it).
But I gave Twitter and Facebook a shot and toggle between both most days. One of my lifelong superstitions is to never talk about any work when it's in progress — lest its essential energy leak out into the atmosphere rather than the page — but I have no such inhibitions doing unrelated, throwaway writing while I'm writing. In fact, I find that posting a tweet or a Facebook status update can be a nice little warm-up, mental knuckle-cracking before getting down to the real business.
Especially in this technical age, the tools a writer has to work with change almost daily — today the Internet, tomorrow nanobot implants for the brain. But I believe the process stays essentially the same. William Gibson suggests that in order to produce one's most creative work, writers need to learn to cultivate their "personal micro culture," an acquired sense of what feels right to the artist, rather than an emulation of others' work. So while many writers I admire practice Internet abstinence, I accept that my nature is more restless and creatively promiscuous. I was, therefore, delighted to learn that my salmon-head-fermenting friends the Inuits call the "Internet," ikiaqqivik, which in Inuktitut means, roughly, "traveling through layers," a word they use to describe what their shamans do in finding answers.
Henry James thought George Eliot, with her sharp eye for the twisty hierarchies of social manners, was one of the best British writers of her time, but he criticized her for what he thought were the overlapping, excessive, and broken plots in "Middlemarch." I think she would have loved Facebook.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee teaches writing at Columbia and is working on a novel about health care.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Opinionator: The Internet: A Welcome Distraction
Dengan url
http://opinimasyarakota.blogspot.com/2013/11/opinionator-internet-welcome-distraction.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Opinionator: The Internet: A Welcome Distraction
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Opinionator: The Internet: A Welcome Distraction
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar