Joe Haldeman is no Luddite. As a science fiction writer, speculating about advanced technology is his business. In real life, he’s a dedicated Mac user, carries an iPhone in his pocket, and he’s looking forward to getting an iPad in a few weeks.
But when it comes time to write the latest of his two-dozen novels, he unplugs from the Internet and other digital distractions.
“I get up around 4:30 or so, and just make some coffee, and write for a couple of hours in longhand out on the porch,” he told me in the latest Copper Robot Podcast. “My porch doesn’t have any electricity, but I have little oil lamps. I light up a couple of oil lamps, and it’s all quiet. I like the soft light. And I just write. I write into blank books, usually spiral-bound books.” He writes using fountain pens.
Joe Haldeman at work
Listen to or download my interview with Joe here:
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“There’s something special about writing by hand, writing with a fountain pen, and there’s something special about writing into a book, to take a blank book and turn it into an actual book. I guess there’s a sort of superstitious or mystical aspect to it,” Haldeman said. “I like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don’t just use it for writing my fiction. I carry a notebook and write down things to do, and I write out thoughts and stuff like that.”
He added, “I think it goes way back to when I was a teenager, and I guess it’s just a habit of thought that you either have or don’t have. If I had had a thing like an iPad when I was a kid, then I never would have gotten into the habit of writing things down by hand.”
Haldeman has a home office with an Internet-connected computer, but he gets away from that to write. “I think the main formal reason is distraction. Writing at a computer, the temptation to click over onto the web is always there and it’s always a little bit distracting even if you don’t notice it. I use it, as many people do, as a momentary break in concentration. I’m sitting there, I don’t know what to type, and so I go over and check the mail, or look up some weird thing.”
Haldeman, the Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author of The Forever War
Unplugging and its difficulties have been in the news lately. The New York Times’s Matt Richtel and a team of journalists looked at the effects of digital technology on our brains and lives in a package of articles. They found that being always plugged to the Internet, computers, smartphones, email, Facebook, Twitter, and other electronic communications, has negative effects, including impatience and forgetfulness, and poor parenting. Our brains need downtime, the journalists found. Richtel discussed the reports on the NPR interview program Fresh Air: “Digital Overload: Your Brain on Gadgets.”
Being always plugged in isn’t just harmful psychologically. Celebrity plastic surgeon Frank Ryan was killed in a car accident last month, he was sending a tweet while driving and drove off a cliff.
Frankly, I think much of the discussion about the need to unplug is overblown. I don’t think the Internet is poisoning our brains, any more than television, rock and roll, or comic books did. Frank Ryan’s problem wasn’t Twitter, his problem was he lacked common sense.
But, still, I fight the compulsive lure of the Internet every day, finding myself checking Twitter mindlessly when I should be doing something else. Like paying attention to the person I’m with in real life.
Joe and I talked about unplugging to allow yourself to create. We also talked about whether we, as a society, are plugged in too much, and how the availability of the Internet and computers has changed people’s writing styles over the past 30 years, during which time Joe has been a working writer and a writing teacher, mostly at MIT.
Click image for a closer look
We talked about his own work, and the role plugging in has played in it. His recent science-fiction novels have featured virtual reality prominently, and the main character of his 1997 novel Forever Peace
The reality of robot war was described in Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
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The Copper Robot Podcast is an occasional series of audio interviews with writers, about writing, science fiction, technology, the Internet, politics and whatever other subjects we ramble on to. Get it here: Copper Robot Podcast. The website is sort of betwixt-and-between now, I’m making the transition from having it exclusively devoted to the podcast to making it my entire personal blog. But you’re smart, you’ll figure it out. Subscribe on iTunes.
Awesome article, and pretty chilling podcast. I’ve always thought that if you want to round out your futurist’s conferences, then you have to include the best speculative fiction authors of our time.
The resistance to ideas like this would be, I’ll posit, a good indication of organizationally dead thinking.
Hey, I’d love to listen to the podcast and previous episodes, but I don’t have iTunes. Do you think you could publish an RSS link for the non-Apple/non-iTunes users out there? (Yeah, some of us still exist).
When I catch myself using the computer for a great deal of time, I stop and unplug. Life is too damned short to be commenting on the Facebook activities of friends all the time…
cdarcy – The RSS link is: http://copperrobot.libsyn.com/rss
Lovely post. People talk about unplugging all the time, but it’s never seemed as attractive as you – and Joe – have made it in this article.
A question suddenly seems terribly important to me: while the plastic surgeon Frank Ryan was sailing over the cliff,and knew he was falling to his doom, was it then that he hit send?
Heh. The contents of his last tweet: AAaaaaAAAAAaaaaAAAAaaaa!!!
No, it was OMG A CLI