The summer after I graduated from college, I moved back to my hometown on the coast of Maine, into the house where I was raised by my mother, determined that I would teach myself how to write.
I worked on a lobster boat that fished out of a wharf about 10 miles down the road, on a Monday-Tuesday, Thursday-Friday trap rotation. On the three days that my captain didn’t haul, I spent my mornings and afternoons all but locked in my childhood bedroom, typing out a growing (and transparently autofictional) novel that resembled, in ways that were totally derivative, the novels I borrowed from the public library.
Everything I did on the page was guided entirely by instinct and imitation — I referenced no craft books, no instruction manuals, no syllabus. I think back on this time of my life with a lot of fondness and a surprising amount of respect for my younger self. For one, I’d never again feel so confident about learning how to do something that I knew so little about. But these days, I’m even more interested in how I wrote than what I wrote.
For four hours at a time, with zero interruptions, I was able to sit at a desk, staring at the pale screen of my brick-like, offline laptop, fully engaged with the singularity of my process, with nothing beyond the strangeness of silence to distract me.
I never faltered from a strict schedule. I woke up around 6 a.m., a late morning compared to my pre-dawn fishing alarm, took a walk to the river that ran through my town, ate breakfast, parked myself in my chair at 8 a.m. and wrote until noon. No one came calling for me at my mother’s house. We had a landline but — was this rare in the early 2000s? — no internet connection. (To this day, my mother, who is from rural Thailand, still chooses to live without internet.) Sometimes the phone rang, but I never answered it.
By the time I broke for lunch, I was always famished, so I stuffed my face with rice and eggs and chili sauce until I felt normal again. Then I walked to the public library for two explicit purposes: to exchange whatever collection of short stories or essays I was wrestling with, and to check, for the only time that day, on one of three extremely large and public desktop computers, the handful of email messages in my Yahoo inbox.
I usually spent about 45 minutes replying to and sending emails to friends. The messages began with “Dear so-and-so,” and ended with “Sincerely, Jaed.” What came in between were three or four paragraphs of observations about the world, and maybe some logistics around the next time we would hang out. When I was done corresponding, I walked back home and sat at my desk for as long as I could stand it. Then the day was, more or less, over. Back to the lobster boat.
What Kept Me at That Desk?
Looking back, it seems a strange ritual to me now — that during these early, devoted hours of learning how to write, my only communication with other people took place during the same window of time, from the same computer kiosk, in the same building, on a mostly regular rotation of days, for most of that year. Just as copying entire opening paragraphs of novels was teaching me how to write better sentences, I think that organizing my time around the temporal rhythm of a fixed schedule was teaching me how to focus my creative energy in the way that writing very long narratives demands.
I know this only because that intensity of creative attention that I remember now with such fondness is — there’s no doubt about it — totally gone. Maybe this is because when you’re young, you’re so enchanted by dreams of what you could become that mundane distractions in the present hold almost zero seductive power. Nothing was more compelling to me then than the idea that I was on my way to becoming something. Now that this something is behind me, it can sometimes be hard to know what, exactly, should motivate me to keep going.
The Mechanics of Life Have Changed
My evolving ambitions aside, this much is true: the ideas that young lobsterman was cooking up were only interrupted by the concerns of other people roughly once every 24 hours.
I know, I know. For some of us, your early 20s is the only period of life when you can actually afford — emotionally, spiritually, financially — to be focused on the sustaining of your own obsessions. Soon enough, life all but shatters those obsessions into a million little pieces, most of which get scavenged by the needs of other people. (I think this condition is called adulthood.) But even so, when held up against the terms of my life now, it’s obvious to me that the mechanics of my life are radically different than they were back then, and this may have something — or a lot — to do with the brokenness of my own creative attention today.
What I’ve Learned Running the Same Trails for 40 Years
I’ve logged miles in the Grand Canyon, White Mountains and San Juans. None of that compares to my lifetime of unmapped loops in Midcoast Maine.On a given day, the little rectangular device in my pocket, on my desk, charging in the console of my truck, delivers probably about 200 to 300 pieces of communication. I don’t have any kind of social media profile (beyond a laughably useless Facebook account), but I still get upwards of 40 text messages a day. Most of these messages are not very crucial nor are they very thoughtful (they definitely don’t begin with the word “Dear,” or contain musings about life).
I have four email accounts — one for one my job, one for personal stuff, one for my other job, one for my volunteer coaching duties — and I check them each probably 10 times daily. It’s pointless (and depressing) to do the math here; it’s more interesting to just hold up the most productive time of my life against the current moment and notice how drastically different these two portraits are from one another.
The Experiment: Wait Until Noon
I can’t fathom how my younger self, sitting in the silence of my boyhood bedroom, could’ve possibly managed to outline the narrative structure of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and transpose that structure into a story about my own experience while receiving a constant barrage of texts, emails and calls. What would’ve become of those long, muted hours of strange contemplation, where my brain was working in a mystically organic way that an AI agent could only dream of, piecing together large and shapeless ideas about the kinds of stories I wanted to tell?
Throughout this summer, as I prepared to send my first daughter off to college, I found myself feeling closer than usual to that earlier period of my life, mining it for clues about how to reclaim a sense of time that, for reasons I am still trying to identify, I seem to have lost track of.
I started by re-reading books I used to love. But as is often the case, they didn’t speak to me the way they once did. And so I leaned instead on more tangible methods: whenever I got a text from someone, whenever I got an email, or a phone call, I told myself, almost mantra-like: just wait until noon. My wife, my daughters — they, of course, got special access to my brain, but everyone else — old friends, coworkers, neighbors, whoever — remained locked in that proverbial desktop computer at the public library.
Then, at noon, I dealt with everyone all at once, just like the old days.
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