We've heard of Writer's Block before, and oftentimes we wish we haven't even been acquainted with the word, nay, the concept. Every famous writer--from Woolf and Hemmingway to King and Grisham, een down to your Average Joe blogger--admits to have experienced it a least once in their writing lives, and every self-confessed writer wouldn't be caught dead denying the reality of that fact.
But for us writers in the hyper-real era of the World Wide Web, a new phenomenon is slowly crippling writing habits, often at the expense of the quality of our work.
Call it however you like, but I find the description of a Twitter friend suited best for this modern case of pen trouble. Writer's ADD, as he called it, occurs when one writes a few lines of text and feels compelled to momentaily abandon it, in pursuit of other preoccupations--like checking e-mail, updating one's status on Twitter, or catching a glimpse of a show on the boob tube.
Call it the curse of our generation, forever exposed to various forms of media, and perpetually disposed to the incessant want to get one's self updated in a world where 24/7 is not a figure of speech, and "stuff" are always happening.
I work as a writer for a monthly computer magazine, and on average I choke out tens of thousands of words both out of nowhere and everywhere evey day.
I never played particular notice to this phenomenon--even though I was well aware I was doing it--until I found out another fella out there was experiencing the same thing as I was.
For some reason, I just couldn't pay heed to age-old--debatably tried and tested--writing advice of deep focus when writing, eliminating distractions while doing the deed, and never stopping until one finishes one's train of thought, bladder and stomach be damned.
When your writing device is also capable of playing movies, bearing zettabytes of literature, or communicating with other people, just how does one "zone out" and let the creative juices flow?
Maybe it's technology laughing back at us for our delusions of progress and development. Right now, for example, I'm writing this piece on my trusty iPod Touch--a music player, photo viewer, Web browser, and gaming machine all rolled into one--aboard an EDSA Norhbound bus, and I am perpetually distracted by texts on my phone, chatter at my back, and even the teeth-gnashing scenes of the movie playing overhead.
Surely Virginia Woolf--what with locking herself in a room for months in end, wrting--didn't have as much "extra-curricular activities" I have right now.
And even then, writing on a moving vehicle wasn't even possible during her time! Try doing what I'm doing on simple pen and paper and let's see if you come up with something that can remotely equal Edgar Allan Poe's poems, heck, even Dan Brown's laughable attempts at novel writing (though I surely enjoyed his plots).
The existence of my proposed phenomenon is largely debatable as it stems from personal experience, but surely the factors revolving around shrinking attention spans--not just in writing--are something to be concerned about.
Still, to say that being surrounded by instantaneous, always-on, perpetually available information is a bad thing in itself is another debate altogether. Some argue that taking "short breaks" from strenuous work jumpstarts the mind; others say any form of distraction is bad for any form of end-goal, and that productivity suffers because of it.
I, on the other hand, say the effects of Writer's ADD is contingent on the quality of output produced while suffering from such a "condition." This post is an example. You be the judge. :)
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