ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, May 13 2010

Don't just do something, sit there
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Novelist Flannery O'Connor once heard from a young writer stuck in a creative
dry spell, who confessed to using reading as a diversion from the agony of
silently staring at a blank page while her muse was away. In a letter penned in
1960, O'Connor shot back a stern response.

"You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do
nothing else;" she instructed, "no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing,
but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don't all right, but you
do not read.... If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not
reading."

The discipline of simply sitting there, quiet and alone in front of her
typewriter in a sparse bedroom in rural Georgia, helped O'Connor write some of
the most vivid, offbeat and memorable stories in American fiction. Today,
nearly half a century after her death, it's interesting to ponder how those
stories might have been different had O'Connor practiced her craft in the
Internet age. Would yesteryear's most imaginative works of fiction, drama,
poetry, painting and sculpture exist if their creators faced the manifold
electronic distractions that tempt even the most reclusive artist today?

It's a legitimate question, given how dramatically digital media devices have
transformed the way we work, play and live. In recent years, Americans have
devoted a lot of attention to such tech-related problems as teenagers baring
their private thoughts and parts online, workers leering at porn sites on
company time and "crackberry" junkies compulsively checking e-mail on family
vacations. Yet we rarely discuss a more elemental aspect of our digital media
revolution: how remaining constantly "plugged in" — with iPods, cell phones,
laptops and the like — affects our ability to contemplate something deeper and
more original than our reaction to the latest YouTube clip or cable-news
mini-scandal.

Admitted BlackBerry addict Barack Obama hinted at that more fundamental
question this past weekend, when he criticized our "24/7 media environment" in
a commencement address at Virginia's Hampton University. The president lamented
that "with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations ... information becomes
a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of
empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation."

Critics pounced on Obama for criticizing the very digital revolution that made
his own tech-savvy presidential campaign possible. But the benefits of
technology — for politicians, scientists and, yes, even writers — do not erase
the drawbacks of living in an environment of constant media noise, in which it
is considered normal to spend nearly every free moment jabbering on a phone,
pecking at a keyboard or gawking at images on a screen. Chief among those
drawbacks is the absence of quiet time and genuine leisure that can lead to
bursts of creative genius.

New research on the human brain suggests that it is downtime, not constant
busyness or hyper-attentiveness to external stimuli, that facilitates our best
out-of-the-box thinking. According to a New York Times report published last
week, scientists tracking the creative process in the brain have found that
creative insights tend to result from a slowing down and derailing of our
habitual thinking patterns. As University of New Mexico neuropsychologist Rex
Jung told the Times, "The brain appears to be an efficient superhighway that
gets you from Point A to Point B.... But in the regions of the brain related to
creativity, there appears to be lots of little side roads with interesting
detours, and meandering little byways."

Surely, technology can be a help or hindrance to these fruitful detours. But it
seems only logical that being constantly tethered to electronic gadgets and
inundated with digital distractions would leave less mental energy and fewer
openings for creativity to flourish.

Perhaps that's one reason why, in a cacophonous media culture brimming with
more information and voices than ever before, it's rare to hear something truly
original. Maybe O'Connor's 50-year-old advice — to cultivate creativity by
making space for silence — is still relevant after all, and not just for the
artists among us.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential
speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her
website is www.colleen-campbell.com.