Fragmentation/Defragmentation 🕸 Issue #6
Reversion to longform is an exercise in building discipline.
The content of this issue was first composed in June 2022 and released as my Twitter Note in that same month. Still, it has a Spinneret feel to it, and so I thought it was worth re-publishing here. Enjoy my ramblings. :)
Over the past six years, I have become a person who is easily overwhelmed by stimuli and numerous demands on my attention. The fast pace of urban life and tech provokes sizzling in my brain, like oil popping from bacon frying in a hot pan. My brain is antagonized by consistent, shortform stimulation, but it also, unfortunately, used to it, resulting in what I call mental fragmentation.
I don’t know how the rest of you are able to function. How do you get any work done when notifications keep popping up for every app on your phone? How are you comfortable with not being able to abide silence without reaching for your phone? How do you spend hours consuming tiny chunks of content at rapid-fire rate, being pulled out of potentially deep work to give in to expectations to answer texts in under a minute?
Mental fragmentation is something I cannot afford as a longform writer, especially not as a writer of science fiction and fantasy and, furthermore, as a person who battles with anxiety.
Most of the fiction I’ve worked on over the past few years has not yet seen the light of day, but my own stories keep getting more and more complex. I am building worlds, creating cultures, reimagining pasts, creating futures, pantheons, technological systems which are, in some cases, far beyond my current level of prowess. It is increasingly difficult to write any piece of fiction shorter than ten thousand words. My writing practice is gradually demanding a level of immersion from me that makes it completely counterproductive for me to engage in things that require fast-and-shallow, rather than slow-and-deep cognitive engagement.
Many other writers can probably testify to the fact that getting into the groove of a story, whether to compose new words or revise old ones, takes a good long time. There is significant distance between the point at which you sit down to write, and the point at which you get comfortable with whatever you’re doing to your story. Now, imagine if “getting into the groove of a story” is something you must wrestle with every single day because it is your chosen and primary career.
For the month of June, I have been, and still am, in a residential writers’ workshop. The project I am working on while here is my most ambitious project to date: a sci-fi novel that I began four years ago and may very well be working on still, four years from now. The world I have built for this book is as complex as anything I have ever had to grapple with, including university-level Calculus II and Astronomy courses. My characters are multitudinous, and the fantastical events of my plot take a lot of energy, discussion, research, and design to become even remotely plausible. I had abandoned this project for two years before this month, to the point where it felt so foreign and large that I was honestly terrified about getting back into it. I feel like I am meeting my characters all over again, re-creating their biographies as well as my entire plot from scratch.
If it takes at least thirty minutes to get into the flow when I sit down for a short story writing session, you can imagine how much longer it might take me—days, even a fortnight—to get back into such an extensive novel that I have taken such a long break from. Impossible to do with a fragmented mind.
And so, I defragment.
I have many strategies, which I rarely employ all at once, although in June, I have been more stringent than usual. Here are a few:
Deleting social media apps from my phone. If I need something from IG or Twitter, it’s browser or nothing. It seemed, at some point, the only way to combat the reflexive motion of opening the app just because the icon is there in my app library.
Turning off vibrations and sounds for notifications on my phone. The buzz of my phone against my desk, or even a “ding” sound may seem small, but it’s enough to pull me out of an attempt to “get into” a story during my writing sessions. After every buzz, it’s like I have to start the process all over again, and on a bad anxiety day, a single vibration can send my heartbeat straight into a tap-dancing routine.
Disabling notifications completely, on both my phone and my laptop. Unless I open an app, I have no idea what is going on within it or who is trying to reach me.
Switching my phone completely off and putting it out of sight.
Going cold analog; writing with pen and paper and leaving all my technological devices behind until I am happy with my written progress.
Blocking out every voice that isn’t my own from my head. Some things, like music and podcasts may seem innocuous, but they occasionally have the same effect as actively consuming people’s social media posts, text messages, or voice notes. In all cases, it is allowing another person’s voice to add to, or interrupt, my own thoughts. If I have to be within my own head to draw my story out, or to extinguish my anxiety, my mental voice often needs to be the only one I am listening to. Silence has become an invaluable and coveted commodity for me lately. And sometimes, even with this method of defragmentation, it takes hours before my mental frenzy starts to ebb away.
Becoming nearly inaccessible through direct messaging and instant messaging platforms. Relevant persons must reach me via email if they need me.
As far as my writing practice goes, these strategies are pretty effective. For majority of the last few weeks, my phone has either been switched off, or left somewhere with cellular data and wi-fi settings turned off. The level of defragmentation this has afforded me has allowed me to get back into my novel project. I continue to see it as a beast, albeit one that can be tamed.
I can summarize the defragmentation process with one phrase: a reversion to longform.
For a season, at least, I can appreciate the necessity of consuming texts that are much longer and more cognitively demanding than 280-character chunks. I see the usefulness of composing long letters at the end of the day to the love of my life, rather than disrupting my workflow by texting him throughout my day, even though I want to. There is something about using email for personal correspondence which slows my brain down, makes me more thoughtful in how I read and respond, and dramatically decreases the pressure I feel to be instantly and constantly available.
Reversion to longform is an exercise in building discipline; re-training my brain to get used to the level of prolonged engagement I need for the marathon that is this prose-writing process.
There are some things one can and must, at least for a time, live without.
Until next time,
The Spider Kid. 🕸️