In Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer, Jeff Vandermeer talks about open connections versus closed connections, and how they affect creativity.
A “connection” in this case is any access point with the outside world, especially those opened by social media. A blog, email account, Twitter, Facebook, and so on — each point at which the writer can be accessed is a connection.
Each writer can handle a different number of open connections. I know some writers who seem to have a limitless capacity for interaction with the outside world even as they are working on drafts or brainstorming. But I think most writers have a certain threshold for the number of open connections they can maintain, and that most work (or would work) better with no open connections during their actual writing time.
I’m afraid I’m one of those writers who needs a severely limited number of open connections at any given time, and none whatsoever while I’m writing. The more intense the stage of the creative process I’m at, the further I pull back, hole up, and hide out (that’s how I’ve earned my reputation as a recluse, probably.)
Even when I’m not in the thrall of my Muse, I can only handle a very few open connections, much fewer than I think most other writers can manage. I can’t have an instant messager open at almost any time; the temptation to procastinate my life away in chit-chat is just too great. I try (and often fail) to keep Twitter off until I’m done with the day’s writing, and if I look at my email before writing I find it almost impossible to get started, even if it’s junk mail and sales notices. I’m a born rabbit-trail-chaser and don’t dare websurf, so internet memes and the popular YouTube video du jour are totally under my radar for the most part. I never even know what to talk about on Twitter anymore.
I’m at a place where I’m ready to count my open connections, set a limit, and start closing some. Jeff Vandermeer says that even connections that we ignore can drain us, and I’ve found that to be true, with so many accounts open all over the place that I’m sometimes surprised to find that the person who has my username at this or that site is actually me.
The most important thing to me, as Jenny Crusie wrote in her oldie-but-goodie article, Taking Out the Garbage, is to protect the work. Social networking, self-promotion and marketing are a necessary part of the writer’s job these days, but not at the expense of the work. So if I have to let some of my accounts go, consolidate, or otherwise shut down a connection, I will. I’d rather write only for myself than spend my life writing bad stuff — or never finishing anything — because I couldn’t concentrate.
(For what it’s worth, right now I’m definitely planning to keep this blog and my Twitter account. Everything else is a potential candidate for scrapping.)
