Here’s a personal essay I wrote for the Quill and Quire, Canada’s book trade magazine, on the state of distraction. Or at least my state of distraction. And how this has led to my strange book, Diversion.
“I feared I was drying up. I feared I was getting old. I feared I was fading away instead of fulfilling my original plan, which was to burn out. I used to have ideas while waiting in lines at grocery stores, or while sitting in a bar, or walking down the street. Now all that time was filled with other distractions: pings from texts, Twitter alerts, 24-hour news crawls, cat videos on Facebook, ads talking to me at bus stops, five to 10 TVs per bar, all tuned to different channels, phone calls interrupting other phone calls, Candy Crush levels to be beaten, emails delivered directly to a watch on the wrist. That cavernous chamber in the brain was now filled all the time. I wasn’t writing because I was distracted.”
