On social media, they relentlessly try to sell me a “distraction-free” writing machine. I of course see these ads on the writing machine I already own. In fact, I own several writing machines of various kinds. One is provided for free by my university; the rest of them I bought. Some of them I haven’t turned on in so long because they need a subscription (My little Chromebook, the light of my life, now forgotten on top of the wood-paneled speaker). I see these ads for these small devices that do little more than what I am doing now – typing characters onto a screen – but they make the promise that they are distraction free. So is this one. I just make it full screen, zoom in with a comfortable fit, and go for it.
Why would I, or anyone who owns a laptop, pay so much money for a less functional typing machine than the one that both you and I are using now, albeit with a lot of time and space in between us? I think that when these people who offer these various machines say “distraction free” they are right out of the princess bride, placing me with Montoya, convinced that word doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Writing is the practice of distraction; it’s distracting from distraction. Distraction moves into the field of view and you move, or you move it, or you move the mind somewhere else. An ancient Zen Koan has three monks looking at a flag flapping in a strong wind. One says, “the flag is moving.” The next says, “No, wind is moving.” The third says, “No, mind is moving.” This to me is the art of writing, or putting ideas down to paper. Or in this case taking one form of chemical electrical impulse and converting it into another.
What does distraction free mean to these folks? I think it means “no excuse” writing. That is, you have to get it down right. In distraction writing (terrible name but this is a blog, a working title, an idea that will take shape as we move down the page together) you just get it down. That’s enough of a struggle. Writing anything down at all with the purpose of one day sharing it with humans for the purpose of changing how they feel or think about something is intimidating, only because we don’t have a better word for it.
Distraction free is imperfection free. People think that if they take breaks when writing, look at the internet or play with various settings on their writing machine they are “not-writing” or at the very least, doing a very poor job of writing. Distraction free means no excuses. There will be no imperfections, no bad writing, because there will only be writing. There won’t be the capacity for anything else.
But writing isn’t writing. It’s a state of engagement with the page that involves so much more than just the keys, the screen, the pen, the page, etc. It involves so many things that if you were to start from scratch and discuss what would be needed to produce good writing, you’d wind up confusing your audience who just wants to learn how to write well. A great example of this is Dr. Jordan Peterson’s syllabus from his time at University of Toronto as an active professor, where he begins the writing assignment with advice on what kind of desk and chair to acquire, as well as what lighting helps with good writing.
Many people feel that whatever they write down is “writing.” Once it is on the page, it’s there, it’s written. More than that, most people seem to think that their writing is “them” in some way, like an image worse than a mirror. Like seeing a photo of yourself you express disbelief and horror right along side acceptance – “Is that what I look like?” The gap between the ego-ideal and the symbolic order is one that infects writing too – “It was so much better in my head.” That’s because it wasn’t. It didn’t exist.
Distraction free is imperfection free which is completion free which forecloses any interpretation of any writing, simply because it’s not going to be there. It can’t be perfect because it isn’t. Getting things down is a cooperative effort that doesn’t feel too cooperative. It involves walking into the kitchen, looking around the room, out the window, checking a cite or three, tabbing over to see if Karen Read is going to prison, changing the volume on Spotify, and a vast number of other factors including what your intestine is doing and that itch that keeps returning in your ear. An extra device will not eliminate any of these things, by the way, but it will add the extra step of finding a spot for your laptop or phone to sit there and refresh the game while you type away on the device that is supposed to make this process clean.
Distraction free might mean clean. It might mean surface clean, or no trace of particulate, dust or stain at all. Too clean to be any good. There have to be inperfections in everything we do not just because we are human, but because it keeps us going. There has to be some grist for the mill. There cannot be a need for oil without an irritation. There’s no need to turn the gear again if it goes around so smoothly that you don’t realize it turned. Cleanliness is next to godliness, it’s true, if godliness is beyond being alive. If godliness is nothing like life, then cleanliness fits there. It has little to nothing to do with everyday existence except as an unattainable goal.
Clean writing -distraction free – is the bizarre fantasy of the genious sitting at the clean desk with pad and pen, staring up into the mesosphere and then writing down, without edits, whatever message they have for their fellow humans. This model of writing was unintentionally parodied by President Trump during is first term as he gave us insight into his writing process for his first inaugural address.
Although this picture generated a lot of laughs and memes on the internet, it’s scarily close to the model of composition and writing many of us have. Alone, empty desk, no distractions (eagle statue a necessary exception) with a pen and a pad getting it all out, direct, no drafts, no helpers, all of it coming right out from the mind to the page, then out through the mouth via the eye into our ears, understanding, perfection.
Contrast this image with the cottage industry of calendars and coffee-table books that feature the desks of famous writers. These images serve as evidence that we are “not writers” at all because we cannot imagine having a desk like that. But show someone a photo of someone’s home halfway through construction and they won’t flinch. Such disarray – wires everywhere, the beams and studs of the house totally visible, some drywall in place, and of course the enignmatic plastic buckets white yet stained with white paint and spackle cluster up together with the rags and trays here and there across the spotted flooring. Can’t wait to move in! We say – because we realize it isn’t finished.
But writing is finished just this fast. As soon as I typed that full stop period there, that sentence was done. Now I’ve just finished another. And again. The medium is insufficient to give an accurate count as to where I am in the process – every time I announce I have finished a line, it is already that I’ve finished two. It’s out there and all done and it better be right or someone might get the wrong idea about not only what I wrote, but about me. Writing is considered permanent, an out there expression of self that cannot be removed or even reconsidered.
We suffer again from the legacy of Socrates. In Phaedrus, Socrates warns his young interlocutor about the danger of writing pointing out that it goes out into the world, interacting with people we’ve never met, don’t know, and can’t explain its existence to them. To make the argument scarier, Socrates compares what we write to our children, and what would happen if we were to turn them loose in the marketplace alone – they would encounter strangers and not be able to communicate who they really are to them.
Writing is powerful – Socrates is right – but it is only a dangerous power when not tempered by the principles of sophistry. Socrates rejected sophistry in every formulation except his own – also communicated in Phaedrus. The principles of sophistry are more vital, more useful in addressing this issue of “distraction-free” writing than Socrates’s own version of good rhetoric. What sophistic principles do is make distraction a part of the strategy. Audience comes with distraction. We could say that being distracted from one’s own convictions in rhetoric is a version of audience adaptation. Staying too close to one’s beliefs, the self, your close feeling of identification with what you write is sticking too close to the self. It could be that you are missing ways to communicate, connect, and in the end convince the audience that you are right. Even better, you can use distraction – all the things circulating around in your head and theirs as reasons that this idea isn’t even really a change at all. They may have had it in the back of their minds the whole time, you just brought it center stage for them. Such would be the mastery of distraction where you argue that the audience is distracted like you are, but you have had an insight through it all – connecting the dots in a different way while they are all checking the news, social media, or worrying about when the next episode of that series is going to drop.
This is really just the first phase of addressing the big threat to writing and identity which we all know as Artificial Intelligence. That topic will be dealt with in some future post(s). For now, go write something and be distracted. Writing is imperfection through and through. Look at this document! The pristine white square is marred. It has squiggles all over it. My fingerprints are everywhere. You are reading it tabbing back and forth between things, just as I have written it. And we still managed to make something meaningful together.
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