Writing in the Age of Contagion

I’d like to talk a little about writing (and, really, just surviving) in the age of contagion we find ourselves in.

This is a tricky subject because I loathe the impetus that capitalism puts on being productive at all costs, especially when you’re sick or stressed out. It’s the same impetus that makes COVID-19 so tricksy, because we’ve all spent far too long soldiering on at work while ill, and that’s seeped into the western mindset.

On the flip side, writing’s important to me. It’s a big part of my self-identity and it’s the thing that keeps me calm. And, as I wrote in my newsletter today, a goodly part of the challenge in writing through the age of contagion isn’t working while sick, it’s working while the world is trying to scare the pants off you.

The tactics that make it possible for me to write through the age of contagion largely coincides with the tactics I use to manage general anxiety, so it’s useful to give myself a pep talk as the world goes askew.

So strap yourselves in, because this is going to be a long one.

FIRST, LIKE AN INTERNET RECIPE BLOG, LET ME TELL YOU SOME BACKSTORY BEFORE WE GET TO THE MEAT OF THIS POST

We’re going through a stressful period in our society, rife with anxiety and uncertainty, and the ability to recognize and acknowledge fear is actually good for our mental health (For more on dealing with mental health challenges during the corona epidemic, I recommend this article over on the Conversation).

Right now, there’s definitely an undercurrent of fear in my day. There’s also a massive undercurrent of resentment towards that fear, because March 18 was always going to be a hard day. If we flash back to 2019, I spent March 18 in a hospital watching my father die of pneumonia after two incredibly rough weeks of watching him deteriorate. It’s also the day my sister was preparing for surgery at the next hospital over, going in to get cancerous tissue removed from her breast.

Old family friends would stop by to wish me a happy birthday before they went to say goodbye to dad. It felt a bit absurd, with everything going on, but social protocols are weird like that.

Twenty-four hours later dad would be dead. My sister would be out of surgery without complications. I’d go home feeling hollowed out and lost, but relatively confident I’d just lived through the worst birthday I was going to have in my lifetime.

Then 2020 went all “hold my beer,” and delivered a global pandemic. One that’s decimated the industries I normally work in, right about the point where I’m planning an exit strategy when my PhD scholarship runs out in July. At the same time, major upheavals like this tend to see a decline the book market, which is not the greatest news at the time when Brain Jar Press was just hist the point where it broke even every month.

All in all, my propensity towards anxiety is running a script in the back of my head that’s constantly panicked at the idea that I’ll be unemployed for a significant stretch and my mortgage will become untenable. Which is a little extra dollop of stress on top of the general uncertainty of Covid-19, my current day-job gig tutoring writing going through a rapid pivot to online classes, and general uncertainty about the health of my loved ones, the state of the economy, and whether we’ll run out of toilet paper.

At times like this, I fall back on the advice of my psychologist when I first fronted up with anxiety issues.

You’ve got no control over what you feel, but you get to decide how you respond to the feelings.

If you’re feeling stressed or anxious about the virus, it’s going to make it harder to ignore distractions and write/work. If you’re caught up in an evolving cycle of stress, it can be damn near impossible.

It’s only a few weeks since I last linked to Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life in my newsletter, but it’s such a useful book for times like this and I’m going to link it again.  The short history of Gallagher’s book starts when she was diagnosed with cancer, and she realised the disease would try to monopolize her attention and thereby take control of her life. Thus started a five-year research jaunt into focus and attention and how it shapes our existence, and Gallagher does a great job of going from the small scale to the large.

For the moment, though, let’s focus on the difference Gallagher draws between “Bottom Up” and “Top Down” attention.

ATTENTION IS EITHER ACTIVE OR PASSIVE

Our experience of the world is invariably guided by what we focus on, a statement that can be applied metaphorically, but is also surprisingly literal when you look out biology. We’re incredibly good at screening out sensory input in order to focus on particular parts of our surroundings, and our experience of the world is incredibly easy to reshape because of it—put a sign up warning people to look out for snakes and they’ll notice things on their walk down the path that would have slipped by unnoticed if the sign wasn’t there.

Tell them to keep an eye out for koalas nesting in the trees above, and their experience will be different again. You’re no doubt experiencing something similar this week, as the world is inundated with information about Covid-19 and responses around the globe.

But there are actually two ways our attention is captured. The first is a passive, bottom-up approach where our attention drifts to whatever seems most compelling and important in our immediate environment. It’s the part of you that’s hard-wired to focus on possible danger or reward. It’s constantly scanning your environment, looking for stimulation, and trying to keep you safe.

And it is, like emotions, an enormously reactive form of attention and largely driven by novelty (Side Note: Social media and computer games capitalise on this by feeding you a constant stream of new data to capture your attention, which is why they’re so good at sucking away available time).

But the other half of our attention is top down—an active, intentional approach that asks “what do I want to be focusing on” instead of following the shiny newness. It’s a fairly human trait, and one that’s powerful enough to block out all manner of distractions, which is great when you’re trying to get writing done. On the downside, because it’s active and voluntary, it tends to take up more resources and demand periods of rest.

Here’s why writing is tricky in times of big stress.

NEGATIVE EMOTIONS DRIVE FOCUS

I’m just going to quote directly from Gallagher here:

Just as you’re primed to attend to swarming insects and snarling dogs, you’re strongly wired to focus on the negative ideas and emotions that signal threats of a different kind. Indeed, whenever it’s not otherwise occupied, your mind is apt to start scanning for what could be amiss, allowing unpleasant thoughts along the lines of “I feel fat” or “Maybe it’s malignant” to grab your attention.

Or, as I’m experiencing today, “oh shit, we’re all going to die” and “oh crap, I will end up broke and living in a ditch.”

This is bottom-up focus at its core, but it is meant to serve a purpose—the emotional reaction is like a small alarm signalling that there’s a possible danger or problem, and you should probably try and resolve it.

The challenge, in times of uncertainty, lies in the fact that no easy solutions present themselves. So you try to resolve the problem by fretting at it and focusing at it, letting your attention get drawn to each new scrap of negative information, until you find yourself in a self-perpetuating loop of new negative stimuli and increasing negative emotions, looking for extreme solutions

Pretty soon, you’re panic buying a year’s supply of toilet paper and trying to figure out where to store it. Or hitting up twitter to question the actions of corporations and officials, demanding they do better, then sifting through varying layers of outrage and misinformation (Another side-note, from Mike Monterio: Twitter’s business model lies in monetizing your attention, so Twitter makes money by getting you to fight with Nazis).

This is one of the reasons why the advice for managing stress around the virus largely starts with some paraphrase of “mute the fuck out of Covid-related keywords on social media, and give yourself a damn break from the stress, goddamnit.” Winnowing your focus down to one or two trusted sources of information, and creating spaces to process the negative emotions and figure out what problem they’re really trying to signal.

CREATING SPACE TO GET TOP-DOWN—PHASE ONE

Mindfulness is a buzzword du jour in health and lifestyle these days, but that’s largely because we’re only just starting to understand the science behind it. Figuring out the benefits of being in the present is hard when you’re only tools for studying involves reflecting on experiences, so it’s only with the advent of pagers, mobile phones, and other devices that psychologists could really dig in and see the effects.

Ergo, there’s now a rash of research on mindfulness hitting a critical mass, and the results are proving to be interesting.

The theory is simple: set a timer for three minutes. Close your eyes and take deep breathes, paying attention to your senses. Don’t focus on clearing your mind—like feelings, thoughts are going to show up regardless of your intention. Instead, let anything that crops up drift away like a leaf on a river. It happened. It’s gone. No big.

Focus on your breathing again.

Or, download an app like Calm and use the guided audio.

CREATING SPACE TO GET TOP-DOWN—PHASE TWO

One of the things that getting anxiety and depression teaches you is just how faulty and short-term some of the default solutions your brain offers up really are when faced with negative emotions. Which is why, when I first started counselling for anxiety, I wrote these words in my notebook: YOUR BRAIN DOES NOT KNOW SHIT.

It was a little reminder that the first response to any stimuli is likely to be ground-up and impulsive, and in the face of problems more complex than “hey look, dangerous animal,” the instinctive response isn’t usually the best option.

So the trick becomes creating space to let the top-down focus kick in, and part of the way you do that is recognizing that responding is usually a three step process.

1. Recognize the stimuli that needs a response
2. Assess and decide on a course of action
3. Implement the course of action

When you’re working from the ground up, you’re packing all three steps into the space of a few seconds. This is an incredibly valuable thing when dealing with simple threats, but less useful for complex and long-term ones.

Which means you want to start slowing your instinctive brain down and giving your top-down brain the space it needs to start getting involved. It’s the reason the vast majority of time and project management systems will start with some variant of identifying major tasks and planning/structuring your day before you actually start doing anything.

So how do we do this? For me, this means maintaining two important lists.

CREATING SPACE TO GET TOP-DOWN–LISTS FTW!

The first is the list of things I need to do on the writing and PhD front, along with associated subtasks that need my attention.

When making this list I do my best to capture everything I can in a single brainstorm–all the tasks associated with it getting it finished (if it’s a book going into publication), or a means of tracking progress on the draft (if it’s in progress), or an acknowledgement that it’s not a project that gets my attention right now (AKA there is no deadline).

I start the day with a rough plan, just like all the time management systems suggest. If you need one, you can find a working version of my daily checkin over on Google Docs, which is adapted from Todd Henry’s work in Accidental Creative and Die Empty. If you need a shorter, less daunting process, I recommend trying Tobias Buckell’s process under “Bullet Journaling: What I do” in this post.

I try to apply a similar philosophy to to my writing, when it’s time to actually work. Rather than sitting down and going “well, time to write a thousand words,” I’ll write a short plan or goal for the writing session, like “I’m going to try and nail this chase through the woods” or “write a thousand word scene that makes it clear Robin and Bertram and fey and dangerous.”

The goal is to try and eliminate as many new decision points as possible when it’s time to actually write/act, because those decisions are a gap where new things will capture my attention and let some bottom-up focus take control.

Because—and let me stress this—that’s going to happen a lot regardless. As acknowledged earlier, the world is a scary place right now. This process isn’t meant to make me superhuman, but rather give me the best chance of focusing on things that are important to me and my goals.

You may not need to go as hard on the detailed planning as I do–a lot of my process is all about managing anxiety–but even a basic list of things that need your attention and when you’ll work on them can help break through the haze of overwhelm.

The second list is a braindump of all the shit I’d like to freak out about, which is actually a list of things I should research solutions to, assess the likelihood of occurring, and brainstorm possible solutions.

Jotting them down is a little signal to my subconscious that I’m aware of the problem, but it’s blocking out a little time each day to research, assess, and plan possible solutions that really eases things up. My panic about being unemployed, for example, was heavily magnified by an imperfect understanding of how defaulting on your mortgage played out.

It was also magnified by seeing it as a binary—pay the mortgage or get kicked out–rather than a process in which there were many possible solutions. Once I stepped back and stopped catastrophising, there were a lot of options between me and abject homelessness (if you need a playbook on how to tackle this kind of thinking, try the process on how to stop catastrophising as a good starting point).

Largely, I’ve noticed the things on this list typically emerge from situations where I don’t have enough information to make a meaningful choice, or concerns where I’m projecting far enough into a hypothetical future where “what do I do next” is unclear because I’ve ignored something far smaller in the short-term and it’s built up.

GRATITUDE POSTING & WINS OF THE DAY

Mindfulness and gratitude are buzzwords du jour in health and lifestyle these days, which makes it incredibly easy to disregard how useful they are.

The thing is, making yourself articulate something you’re truly grateful for shifts your attention in meaningful ways. First, you have to appreciate the little moments of good among the chaos of everyday life. Then, you start looking for more to be grateful about in your days, rather than focusing entirely on the swirling storm of negative stimuli out there.

This lengthy email is very much a response to this habit. I came home from a crazy stressful shopping trip yesterday and didn’t much feel like writing a newsletter at all, because finding my way through the maelstrom of feelings seemed too daunting on top of everything else going on. Instead, I sat down and wrote a Facebook post to show my appreciation for Helen Marshall (SF author and lecturer) for the way she’s taken the burden off her students and tutors amid the temporary shutdown of UQ and a veritable tsunami of less-than-informative emails from the uni administration.

Not long after, I started writing this.

Gratitude’s power lies in its capacity to shift your attention away from negative emotions, but don’t get caught up in the word and its connotations. The age of contagion is a really good time to just show up and appreciate things—if you’re getting stressed out, do a social media post about a book you’re a fan of or throw an image of the things you love on Instagram.

Interestingly, you can use the same to hack your brain by logging your daily writing wins. These don’t need to be big—today, simply writing is going to be a win—but doing a quick recap where you focus on the things you’re really proud of after a writing session be a useful tool to keep you enthused about getting back to it in this time of contagion.

FOCUS ON WHAT YOU CAN CONTROL

Writing is an uncertain gig at the best of times, so this advice tends to apply across the board. You can’t control whether or not your book sells, but you are in control of how much time you spend working on it and how many submissions you make.

The age of contagion moves a whole slew of things out of our control as writers. I cannot force people to buy books, nor stop the Australian dollar from tanking. I cannot stop people from panic buying, nor ignoring the advice to self-isolate.

I cannot dismantle the systems of capitalism that force all sorts of casual workers to go make difficult choices about whether to go to work and risk infection, or stay home and risk financial stress as their wages disappear.

But I do have control over my own writing process, my release schedule, and how I present my work to people in these times of stress. I can choose how my social media presence will operate and what it will focus on.

I can control my my feeds by setting up muted words/accounts, and how much time I give to social media. I have control over how I respond to the stress of everything, and how I manage the impact on my work habits.

And I have access to a toolkit, hard-earned through psychologist visits and research, that’s surprisingly useful in days like this.

LAST-MINUTE TOOLS TO ENHANCE YOUR FOCUS

• If distraction is proving a problem, switch up your toolkit. Get offline and break out a notebook, or focus on editing.
• If you’re really struggling, fire up the pomodoro method and write in 25 minute sprints with a five minute break. Don’t worry about how much you’re getting done, just focus on working for the period of time.
• This is an important one: LOWER YOU DAMN EXPECTATIONS. There’s a natural tendency to overreach when you’re freaking out about the state of the world, as you can assert control. Aim for less than your peak productivity, and go easy on yourself.
• Similarly, focus on the process, not the goal. Writing is often a gig where small, incremental progress adds up over time, so focus on the efforts you need to put in today rather than the place you’re ending up.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

To save you scrolling back, here’s a quick recap of some of the most prominent sources/books referenced in this post.

• Winnifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life is heavily referenced above, and a resource I recommend to everyone over the coming weeks.
• Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s post on Disruptions and the book industry’s response to black swan events is solid reading for any writer working through the age of contagion.
• Louise Stone and Katrina McLean have written a great article on coping with the stress and anxiety of the coronavirus for The Conversation.
• Sane Australia’s article on How to Stop Catastrophising is a great crash-course on challenging anxious thoughts.
• Berkley’s Greater Good project on the ways Gratitude can benefit out mental health.
• You can grab a copy of my (admittedly complex) daily checkpoint process off google docs. I’m a guy who likes a lot of prompts and moving parts.
• Tobias Buckell’s (far more streamlined) daily planning is available in the bottom third of this blog post about the way he hacked the bullet journal process.
• It’s only a side note in the post above, but Mike Moterio’s Ruined By Design is incredibly useful for understanding how and why social media drives certain types of content out way (with some strong, forthright arguments about the ethics of that approach).