DIGNIFIED DETOURS

I’ve never been more productive than when I was in high school and college. This was due to a combination of youthful enthusiasm, a misguided conviction that I was more or less inventing modern writing¹ and the extreme amounts of free time I had. The thing about that free time, though, was that it was also kind of excruciatingly boring. Back in those primitive days your only choice for entertaining yourself while taking a 45-minute bus ride from your dorm to your first class of the day was listening to music and reading. Nothing is wrong with either, but I lacked the hypertextual ability to skim endless, infinite stuff. If I’d had the internet when I was 18, I’d probably still be on that bus, falling down an endless rabbit hole of dog tippy-tap GIFs² .

Every writer has had to battle to carve out a few hours in order to write—over a weekend, or at night after the kids have gone to bed—only to snap out of a Facebook daze two and a . Among social media, news sites, kitten videos and tons of websites you’ll have to justify visiting to the FBI someday (most likely by claiming it was in the interest of “research” for your book), it’s easy to lose all your precious writing time in a swirl of clicking because the internet and social media are that way. The Algorithm is powerful stuff, and it’s not only designed to attract your eyeballs, it’s designed to keep them there for as long as possible .