‘I have to put my phone in the wardrobe’: how do authors deal with social media?
Matt Haig, Danez Smith, Ayòbámi Adébáyò and other writers on staying focused and their top tips for switching off
Zadie Smith “can’t stand the phones”. Nick Laird pointedly owns a phone that’s not smart. Brett Easton Ellis despises Instagram as “that fake place” while Jonathan Coe has said he finds being on Twitter “a bit like writing in a virtual cafe”. Mark Haddon announced a retreat from Twitter when The Porpoise was published because of “a growing sense that it was detrimentally affecting the way I both looked at and thought about the world around me”, but has posted every week since. Ayòbámi Adébáyò, author of Stay With Me, keeps two mobile phones, and when she writes, she hides the one with all the apps in the wardrobe. Authors can have an uneasy time with social media; “always twitching the sleeve with its wants and needs”, as Robert Macfarlane puts it (at which point, he says, he shuts it down for a few hours). So how do writers manage – or deploy – the distractions?
You can see the attraction. Social media offers instant readers; a book takes years to deliver them. Instagram and Twitter provide open access to inspiration, ideas, research, community and paid work – but any writer who is writing on social media cannot in the same moment be writing their next book. The one takes away from the other, even though the other is the thing writers are meant to live by. This must be why Twitter is a junkyard of abandoned handles whose owners have temporarily stepped away to focus on their next novels (you could call this doing a Sarah Perry) or to avoid the noise around publication (doing a Sally Rooney). But often the deserters return. Even Salman Rushdie, who let it be known he had “abandoned Twitter” in 2016 after the election of Donald Trump, was drawn into a comeback by the news that Midnight’s Children was being adapted for Netflix and has been tweeting enthusiastically since his shortlisting for the Booker prize.