The Phone Has Won

Our attention is broken into so many tiny pieces now. I’m bereft at how scattered our minds have become. It’s very difficult to stay on point as writers. When I say ‘on point’, I mean stay on the page. We begin writing, then an email pops up. Our phone pings or rings. I’ve turned off all social media notifications because that would be a step too far, given the sheer number of ways people can now reach us. Then we look up one small thing on the internet and find ourselves reading something entirely unrelated. Ten minutes later, we still haven’t moved our writing forward.

And we wonder where that lovely, floaty feeling of being inside the world of our stories has gone. We need to be more careful than ever to guard that world.

How can a character speak to you while you’re making coffee if you’re checking your phone? How can a scene rearrange itself while you’re walking?

Phones are such thieves. They’ve stolen the way we notice a fragment of conversation or the exact colour of the sky.

I write this while travelling around the Australian countryside and speaking with writer friends. So many of them have lost the battle to write.

The phone has won.

This is one of the biggest problems facing creatives. The path to doomscrolling and evening TV is littered with dead projects. I’m seeing more defeated writers than ever before.

At the recent Sydney workshop for The Art of Writing, we did the following exercise during our Essentials of Story class. The writers found it enormously helpful.

So do this now. Put your phone on silent in another room and open a scene you’re working on.

Write one sentence:

My character wants __________, but __________.

Now read the scene again.

Is that struggle alive on the page? What does your character risk losing? Where could you make it harder for them to get what they want? Choose one moment and increase the pressure. Add an interruption, a refusal, a discovery or a lie.

Then rewrite that section without checking your phone. Give your character a problem and they’ll give you something to write. Everything around us is competing for our attention.

Please don’t be one of the writers who gives up.

In other news:

Registrations for the Art of Writing in Florence in May have opened. Fancy a bit of travel in Italy while you write? Join us in Florence and I wouldn’t dilly dally as this 7-person retreat is filling up fast. Drop me a line at clifford.lisa@hotmail.com if you’d like the full program. I’ll teach The Essentials of Great Storytelling, Character and Your Major Dramatic Question, Sense of Place, including a walking and writing tour through Florence, and Memoir. Bernadette Foley of Broadcast Books will join us by Zoom for Structure and Plot, structural editor Laurel Cohn will teach Backstory, and Georgette Jupe of Girl in Florence will be with us to explore Building Your Brand: Does It Really Matter? We’ll also share drinks and a Q&A with a literary agent by Zoom, selected according to the publishing territories most relevant to the writers attending.

In more other news:

If you’d like to read more of my work, you can buy the e-book of The Promise here and Or Death in the Mountains here. Each tells a story close to my heart. One of love, the other of loss and the search for truth.

A little bit more Save the Date type news:

Sydney was such a success, and such an absolute blast, that I would love to do it all again next August! I’m looking at 27, 28 and 29 August 2027, once again in Double Bay surrounded by books and fully catered. There will be an entirely new rollcall of workshops, including The Use of AI in Your Book and Finding Your Major Dramatic Question, along with wonderful guest teachers, authors and publishing professionals.

More details soon, but if you missed Sydney this year and would like to join us next August, let me know. There’s nothing on the site yet but I have a feeling places may disappear quickly so write to me so I can pop you on the list: clifford.lisa@hotmail.com