Orpheus Checks His Email, by Anne Nesbet

"Sometimes writers travel and get jet-lag. The end."

                                    --the first version of this blog post

Life can be a very scattered and scattering thing. Over the last couple of weeks, I have felt that scattering at work on me: I had all these very important things to get done, but I was away from home, away from the internet, and had seven days' worth of driving to soldier through, not to mention abbeys to visit, cooking to do, gigantic windmills to walk up the hill to see--oh, did I mention I was on vacation? It's all lovely, a vacation, and yet when I'm distracted, even if the distraction is caused by wonderful things, I begin to feel a little desperate around the edges.

I begin to worry about THE STORY. What's happening to THE STORY?

We human beings like to take the randomness of the universe and make some bit of it make sense. Writers specialize in turning random pieces into a story, compressing the too-big spaces and messy ongoingness of time into something smaller, more focused, enveloped in the comfortable walls of a beginning and an end.

(A photograph does the same thing; so does a stone vase; so does a château: this picture

contains a ridiculous amount of human compression of the universe into art.)

When we are distracted and scattered and unable to do the work of making things make sense, it can feel like everything slips through our fingers and always will.

OH MY GOODNESS HOW DO WE EVER GET ANYTHING DONE?

Really! If it's not one thing, it's another! When I had baby twins, I crawled through every day without ever having a moment to focus. What was happening to the story then? And of course we have an infinite number of other distractions: guests, students, internets, having to walk the dog, illnesses, soccer games, hot weather.

Dog distracted by turkeys

It makes me think again about poor old Orpheus. It's really a story about focus. Orpheus focused so hard he almost brought his beloved Eurydice back from the land of the dead: he almost changed the whole story of the world. And then he got distracted, lost his thread, checked his email, forgot himself, turned around, looked to see whether Eurydice was still following him up the path--and lost her.

(Then he was torn apart, which is about the extremest version of distraction ever, and an unpleasant way to go.)

THE STORY is our Eurydice, the love we go bravely down into the underworld to rescue. We have to focus like crazy to bring it back to the surface. This is tough. Distractions nibble at us and sometimes tear us right apart.

It occurs to me now that The Wrinkled Crown, coming out this fall, is in some ways a retelling of the Orpheus myth. Linny has to go to the ends of the world to save her best friend--she has to be brave; she has to stay focused; she remakes the world and changes all the stories.

We have to be brave. We have to stay focused. And we have to celebrate like crazy whenever THE STORY makes it all the way into the world.

No Internet = more writing? Not exactly...

Once upon a time, the Internet at Yahong's house went kaput.

Being unprepared for such a tragedy, she nevertheless made the most of it and proceeded to use all her time to write, as all good writers do. Unencumbered by the distractions of the WWW, Yahong managed to finish draft three of her WIP, process beta feedback and complete a major series of revisions, all within two weeks.

Ha. I wish.

No Internet (and no data plan on the iPhone) means no compulsive email checking, no meandering off into the blogosphere and no siren calls of solitaire, sure. But that doesn't equal higher wordcounts, or even quality output. I've always thought that if I could just afford to take one of those writers' retreats, where I could cut myself off from the rest of civilization -- no distractions, no worries, no responsibilites -- my novel would practically write itself.

Wrong. Instead, when I'd reach a particularly gnarly part of the plot, I'd set aside my pencil and reach instead for a book, reassuring myself that I was creatively unblocking myself. Or I'd turn to more menial writing tasks, like a review or a blog post. In essence, I was perfectly capable of creating my own distractions.

What does this all mean? It means that you shouldn't wait for better circumstances to start writing. (Although I wouldn't exactly say lacking Internet was a pleasant situation...) If you want to write, you write. Maybe you'll be more productive at a writers' retreat, or maybe you won't be. But attending a retreat doesn't make you a writer -- putting words on paper does.