Phones Are Ruining Our Writing

Yes, I’m ranting about the phones too

Sometime in the last two years, I lost the spark I used to have with writing. Most of what I’ve written in that time feels very stilted upon re-read. I have to line edit a lot more than I used to so that character voices sound natural. The frequency of my writing also drastically diminished. It used to be as much compulsion as it was dedication, but at some point the compulsion just went away. And when it did, the inspiration did too. The fact that all this happened to line up with graduating therapy and actually achieving a level of sanity and peace I have never known was… scary. I’ve found myself worrying a lot, “was the suffering where the art lived?”

I’m happy to report that no! Being miserable (as I have occasionally been the last couple years) did not summon my muse back. Being off my fucking phone did, though.

It started with a road trip and a plane ride last winter. I was forced for long hours to not scroll my brains away, and immediately The Ideas came back. First in new characters or finally fixing a troublesome outline. Then when cleaning up various home disasters in February took over my free time, the actual words came back. And in March-April, work squeezed my brain like an orange until even looking at my phone screen gave me a headache…so I just kept staring at my computer screen for hours furiously typing.

My back constantly hurts, my sleep is fucked, and I haven’t felt this good in years.

Social media—especially short form video—has ruined my ability to be patient, an essential component of writing a novel. There is no such thing as instant gratification in the novel-writing process, though there are ways to work with that drive. Social media also encourages a truncated, lazy form of storytelling that I have noticed infecting my speech and writing. While there are certainly creators using the shortened medium to tell amazing long stories, they are spliced between ads and stupid takes and cats seeing cucumbers for the first time. Sprinkle in the infectious tiktokification of language (it’s giving cult, i fear), and I just feel like my writing is getting actively dumber. I can’t keep up with my characters, can’t stick to a well-paced narrative, and use the same sentence structures over and over.

This is not an old man complaining about the kids these days, I promise. Even if the content I consumed on the internet was entirely intellectual or I never heard the voice of a Zoomer, I think my creativity would still be shot. The algorithms actively curate sameness for you, no matter how much it feels like newness because it’s not the regular faces you follow. Content recommendations are just formulas that take your existing interaction behaviors, add in what other people in your demographics are consuming, and give you a slightly different version of something you have already seen. The internet feels like a place where we are all interacting and seeing new perspectives or innovations. But I have noticed a decided flattening of my worldview and opinions in the last 5ish years as algorithms have gotten more sophisticated.

I don’t have anything to say about phones and social media that we don’t already know. I even know that some of the data around the feeling that “phones are bad for us” is inconclusive. All I can provide is my anecdote of one person, saying that phones are bad for my creativity. That being forced away from the dopamine rush of scrolling for a few days even to deal with really annoying shit has given me a deeper kind of pleasure and sense of fulfillment. I haven’t been a monk or anything, I’m still Very Online 🥲 But not being able to compulsively check my phone throughout the day has had a remarkable, track-able impact on me.

I’m still working on how to make this my new daily life when I am not in the throes of the most infuriating work bullshit or boarding an airplane. But here are some tricks I’ve found that work to stay connected to my creativity…

Allow for Boredom – this is a whole other rant, but basically when I feel the compulsive urge to scroll, I instead stare at a wall or the ceiling for a few minutes. The energy to do things comes rushing back so much faster than when I spend an hour on the couch in front of my phone. Boring activities include petting my cat with all my attention, going for a long drive, rawdogging a walk around town, and watching rain ambiance videos.

Write However, Whenever - my notes app is full of random scenes and bits of notes because I don’t want to abandon the inspiration when it’s been so hard to find. Does it look from the outside like I am still just staring at my phone? Usually. But sometimes just getting in front of my computer or notebook to write the “right” way is too high of a barrier to entry. I use my notes app or the google doc app to write the moment an idea comes to me, including sitting in the grocery store parking lot in the heat.

Write Whatever - maybe this is a me thing, but I get very in my head about what I’m supposed to write and when. When I was more in sync with my creativity, that kind of discipline was good for staying on track with projects. Now I just need to write. Anything. Everything. So I gave myself permission to write any project, any scene, any whatever. As long as I’m writing. That’s how I got updates about random projects like this.

Create a Focus Setting Like You Have Been Kidnapped And Carted Off To The Woods - sometimes I’ll be in the flow, writing my heart out, and suddenly a news headline will pop up. And then somehow it’s 45 minutes later and I opened Instagram. So I created a custom Do Not Disturb focus setting that not only doesn't give me push notifications, but also doesn't show me that I have any outstanding texts or messages or anything. So if a document or google result takes .2 seconds too long to load and I open my phone just to see if anyone texted, there’s nothing there to see. There’s all sorts of other customizations to it too, but that’s the most important. Just controlling for my worst impulses. I keep this setting on all day, because it’s easier to keep staying off my phone if I never start looking at it in the first place.

Stay Away From Video - I haven’t been living like a cavewoman, I do still check social media. But I’ve found that sticking to apps like Substack, Tumblr, and Pinterest that (usually) don’t have video, or staying out of the reels swim lane on IG, helps with keeping my creativity. There’s something particularly predatory to the senses and the mind about short form video, both because it’s like jangling keys in front of a toddler and because it feeds you exactly what you want to hear, even if what you want to hear is an echo of your own hopelessness about the state of the world/politics.

Listen to Pre-Internet Music - you know “iphone face”? The phenomenon where an actor seems entirely unsuited for a period drama because they just look like they’ve seen an iphone before (*cough* Wuthering Heights movie *cough cough*). I’m convinced there is a music version of that. Maybe it’s about the production quality or the lyrics or the suggestion algorithms on music platforms doing the same taste flattening. But I can not listen to any modern music and not think about my phone eventually. Whereas when I listen to classic motown or 60s rock or 90s shoegaze, I want to do things. Even if the thing is just lying there listening to the music (see: the benefits of being bored). This is the playlist I’ve been going back to when I want to stay in a “happily ever after” mindset to pull me back into writing when I have the chance:

Those are the things helping me the most! How do you maintain your creativity and focus in a digital landscape trying to distract you?