Challenges Writers Face in the Digital Age

Concetta Cucchiarelli
November 07, 2024 | 3 min read

Have you ever seen photos of the place where Virginia Woolf wrote many of her masterpieces?

It's a study in Yorkshire, a small room with a desk, a chair, an oil lamp, a bottle of water, newspapers, and notes.

It's not much different from the places we write nowadays. Many people don't have such a dedicated spot. Still, we have something to write on, something to drink, somewhere to sit, and something to light up the place (though no oil anymore).

There is one big difference, though: these days, we write on a laptop with a smartphone nearby.

This means that while we write in the physical world, sitting before a keyboard, we are also half in a different world, where people are talking, sharing, and commenting — even if they are not physically with us, they create tangible effects on our consciousness.

The difference, to put it simply, is that we live a digital life.

Chronic Information Overload

In addition to the things we encounter in our physical world, we are also constantly bombarded by an incredible amount of information from the digital world, such as emails, memes, texts, status updates, photos, videos, news, you name it.

Twenty years ago, information scientists estimated that an American was being exposed to information equal to 178 newspapers daily. That’s massive, right?

Today, that exposure has doubled.

And even if, at first glance, more seems better, especially when it comes to the availability of information, more actually means a significant erosion of our cognitive abilities.

To make sense of all this information, our brains need to filter it down, separating what's useful from what's not. This means making many minute decisions, which in turn means enormous cognitive costs.

In order to write, we must accomplish several different things, like staying still for a certain amount of time, not getting distracted, and generating new ideas. This is already a considerable effort on top of the monumental amount of information our brains are dealing with.

To make sense of all this information, our brains need to filter it down, separating what's useful from what's not. This means making many minute decisions, which in turn means enormous cognitive costs.

But it's not just about quantity.

Imagine living in a giant library full of books (one of my biggest dreams). That doesn’t sound bad. But now imagine those books coming alive and starting to attack you. You have to protect yourself while knowing that among the books you are trying to avoid, there are also books you need to live and thrive.

That’s the struggle your brain is going through in the modern world.

In other words: most information we receive nowadays is unrequired but we have to sort through it to find the information we need to live. Not only that, the unrequired information is also specifically designed to get through to our brains through the emergency path dedicated to vital information. (“10 Reasons You Need To Change Your Fabric Softener Now!”)

At the end of the day, the problem is this: being exposed to a massive amount of information puts us in constant information overload.

That’s something Virginia Woolf definitely didn’t have to deal with in the early twentieth century.

The Mental Price of Social Media

Of course, one of the most significant sources of information these days is social media.

Distractions from social media are the sneakiest. First, they hook our attention, carrying us away from the task at hand.

After that, many become internally rooted thoughts that we replay in our minds, affecting deeper levels of our being, like self-esteem, and strongly affecting mood and emotions.

Adding another layer, social media is constant, which generates a fear of missing out on something potentially relevant or important.

More Is Not More

As the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon predicted in 1977, "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

Cognitive fatigue from filtering out, decision-making, and self-control management translate into body tiredness, fatigue, and anxiety.

That's why we should not overlook the role of information overload in our ability to focus, be productive, and especially to be creative.

Cognitive fatigue from filtering out, decision-making, and self-control management translate into body tiredness, fatigue, and anxiety.

The worst nightmare of every writer, Virginia Wolf included, used to be the empty mind of writer's block.

But in the digital era we find ourselves in, our minds are so full of information that an empty mind is almost desirable.

[BACK TO “WHY FOCUS IS DYING”]

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It's no secret that the tiny island of Ireland has contributed way more than its fair share of brilliant writers and poets to the canon of literature known and loved across the globe.

The island is home to four Nobel laureates and five Booker Prize winners, and has spawned household names like James Joyce, Colm Tóibín, Maeve Binchy, and Sally Rooney.

People the world over have tried to speculate why this is. Is it something in the water? Is it the luck of the Irish?

As Colm Tóibín says,

"In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation."

So we decided to go on a mission to learn from some of Ireland's greatest writers.

Here are just a few of the quotes that struck us:

"A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave."

Oscar Wilde cuts right to the heart of creativity here. What is creativity but the mind striking out of the grooves of regularity?

 

"I love communicative problems. They always introduce just enough friction for me to feel drawn into a scene, when there’s some slippage between what somebody is trying to say, or feels capable of saying, and what the other person wants to hear or is capable of hearing."

If you've read any of Sally Rooney's award-winning books, you'll recognize this device in her plots. Try the same in your work when things are feeling a little dry or slow.

 

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."

Nobody presents writing truths as concise and witty as Oscar Wilde. Who among us hasn't agonized over a comma for hours?

Sounds like Oscar needed a Freewrite.

 

"I don’t ever plot. And I do very little research, as little as possible. I prefer to use my imagination. Language is older and richer than we are and when you go in there and let go and listen, it’s possible to discover something way beyond and richer than your conscious self."

Claire Keegan's a freewriter! In this interview, Claire explains that the main character in her award-winning book, Small Things Like These, completely changed over the course of rewrites and revisions.

 

"The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize."

Colm Tóibín perfectly sums up the disembodied experience of writing here. The writer disappears and the characters take center stage.

 

"The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously."

James Joyce was certainly an adventurer, and though his notion to a "modern writer" predates ours by about a century, we don't think all that much as changed. Writers still need to take risks!

 

"I don’t say I was ‘proceeding down a thoroughfare.’ I say I ‘walked down the road.’ I don’t say I ‘passed a hallowed institute of learning.’ I say I ‘passed a school.’ You don’t wear all your jewellery at once. You’re much more believable if you talk in your own voice."

Maeve Binchy's own voice is apparent in every book she wrote. Her characters speak like real people, and that makes them all the more endearing.

 

"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."

What a poetic way to encapsulate the experience of writing poetry. Yeats certainly knew a thing or two about using that internal quarrel to create beautiful, timeless work.

 

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