I have just picked up On Writing, Stephen King’s well-known primer on, well, writing. Surprisingly, I’ve never read it before, but then I’ve not read that many books on ‘how to write’. Yes, I know I did a Masters on it, but that was on Creative NON-Fiction, so a slightly different beast. Compared to my other pastime, running, where I have nerded up on the history, the main methodologies, and the mechanics, I haven’t read many technical books about writing stories.
Of course, like running, you can read all the manuals you can get your hands on and still be rubbish at the doing. But the more you do the doing, the more you improve from where you were before. That’s the hope anyway with both my writing and my running.
Another tip to writing by King is to read more. He suggests keeping a book with you at all times, for those occasions where you’re waiting: at the airport; in traffic; at the doctors. You might think you don’t have time, but there are slices of time in the in-between. He wrote the book in the late nineties. What we do now with those in-between times is to look at our phones.
What the last three days has shown me, when the house has been without WIFI, is that I have a problem.
Despite the fact that I had to put my phone down because I don’t have unlimited data, my hands were twitchy. Even when I was reading, or writing, I stopped every fifteen minutes or so and had the urge to check something on my phone – not even related to what I was reading about or writing; the weather in Loch Ness for example. Random thoughts and questions pop into my head and normally I can find the answer straight away, and I may return to my book, or I may scroll elsewhere for a while. And before I know it, that time has disappeared.
I knew I had a problem before. But I did the thing that Stephen King did when he found a huge box of empty beer cans only a few days after the box had been empty. Instead of trying to solve his addiction, he tries to hide it, and I have only been doing the same. Cutting the internet line while strimming the hedge was perhaps the intervention that I need to create a less dependent me. I can’t exactly stop using my phone. Unlike alcohol or drugs, it’s become a necessity, especially as I’m obliged to harass everyone with my own book publicising posts.
I need to physically leave the phone in the other room for periods at a time and wean myself off the twitches. Perhaps look at it twice a day for half an hour. I’m not sure if that will always work but I know now that I must stand up.
Hello everyone, my name is Rita and I am an addict.
