Just over ten years ago I embarked on my first assignment for this magazine—a profile of Chuck Palahniuk, who was at that point a relatively new writer in Portland, Oregon, and whose star was just beginning to rise. One of the people I needed to talk to for the story was Tom Spanbauer, a local writing guru and somewhat of a mentor to Palahniuk who is the author today of four novels, including Now Is the Hour (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

Looking back, what I remember about Spanbauer’s house is this: It was dark and quiet. He had an old computer sitting in the middle of a table in his dining room. Since this was a decade ago, I pointed to it and asked if he could “dial up” from there. His exact wording is gone now, but he said something to this effect: “Writing, for me, is a deeply private affair, and I can’t imagine making the place I write so public.”

“Get with the times, old man!” I thought to myself. But still the idea lodged itself deep in my mind and has resonated ever since. Maybe I didn’t quite realize how much I was already beginning to struggle with the same dilemma. And surely I had no idea how much that tension would grow as connective technology, in all its forms, threatened to consume the dark, private corners where I could be alone with my own thoughts.

But now we are well into that era, and many of us have felt this strain far more acutely, as access to the Internet has become ubiquitous and effortless, and the amount of information out there has become nearly impossible to fathom. Scientists at the University of California in San Diego calculated that in 2008 (a year after the original iPhone was released) Americans consumed thirty-four gigabytes of information per day, the equivalent of one hundred thousand words—or 350 percent more than we consumed on a given day in 1980.

Not surprisingly, there has been an avalanche of stories about the effect this is having on us, and specifically about what this means for our brains. Most of the news is not so good: One study suggests our lack of downtime is lowering our ability to think critically and to analyze. Others claim distraction causes loss of IQ points, and that it can take up to twenty-five minutes to regain our focus after an e-mail or phone call. Another study estimates that distraction is costing the U.S. economy around $650 billion a year in lost productivity. Much of this research seems to validate the words of the Roman thinker Publilius Syrus who said: “To do two things at once is to do neither.”

These deleterious effects are catalogued at length in Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010). Carr, who is a freelance writer, could not even finish writing the book without moving his family up into the mountains, away from all the distractions against which he was railing. 

This is an increasingly common lament among writers these days. Novelist Richard Powers, author most recently of Generosity: An Enhancement (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), says that he used to work for twelve or fourteen hours straight, but that such immersion has become impossible. In her lecture after receiving the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing said: “Writers are often asked, ‘How do you write? With a word processor? An electric typewriter? A quill? Longhand?’ But the essential question is, ‘Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?’ Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas—inspiration.”

Other writers such as Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, and Jonathan Lethem have gone on record saying they write on Internet-disabled computers. There is, of course, a very good reason for this.

In his landmark book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (HarperCollins, 1996), psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses the five stages of creativity—preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, and elaboration. Of these, it seems that at least three, if not four, are incompatible with the constant influx of new and fascinating information we encounter online. What creativity needs most of all is time for the mind to percolate, to mix old ideas together in new ways, and to find connections no one else has found. For this the mind must be left to itself.

I was curious to see if Csikszentmihalyi had any thoughts on what effect our current state of endless self-entertainment might be having on creativity, so I called him at his home in California.

“Yes, absolutely, I think it’s something to worry about,” he told me. “Many creative people enjoy the company of people. They get as much information and stimulation as possible—until they reach the point of saying, ‘Okay, now I know what I have to do.’ Then they close themselves off from any kind of contact and put themselves in a position where they can’t be distracted. You have to reduce the cacophony of information into some new shape, whether that’s a poem, or a piece of music, or a mathematical calculation.”

Much as my inner technophobe hates to admit it, we’ve gotten to the point where the Internet is something we can’t live without. It’s the reason I can make a living as a freelance writer while living in Minneapolis. It’s why I can sit here and research everything from particle physics to particleboard while communicating with people from all over the world. It’s how I can watch endless hours of stupid YouTube videos, instead of having to wait for something decent on HBO.

Not long ago, however, I started to have a feeling that I couldn’t quite shake. I started falling behind on projects and was never turning assignments in on time. I would sit down to research something, and it would take me three times as long as I’d planned. I couldn’t focus. I started to feel overwhelmed, less and less able to control what I thought about. Online I would get a bizarre, Internet-induced amnesia, totally forgetting whatever I’d gone online for. I even wrote about the importance of getting offline, but found I was less and less able to simply do that.

There were many possible reasons for this. It could have been because my wife and I had two small children I could (often) hear screaming from my home office. It could have been because the economy was on an express train into the tank and I was the sole breadwinner, on just a sputtering freelance income.

But there have always been things to be overwhelmed by. This felt different. I felt fragmented inside. It was like trying to bushwhack through a jungle full of Natalie Goldberg’s monkey minds. In Creativity, Csikszentmihalyi identified four major obstacles that keep people from creative accomplishment: psychic exhaustion, easy distraction, inability to protect/channel creative energy, and not knowing what to do with that energy.

The Internet was not helping me on any of those fronts. This may have been because of tension between the two traits many creative people have: openness and curiosity on the one hand, and an “obsessive perseverance,” as Csikszentmihalyi puts it, on the other. Online, I would stay in open and curious mode for far too long, and it was getting harder to transition to the ruthless single-mindedness I needed to get anything done.

Yet those two qualities may not be as paradoxical as they seem. Both are ways of controlling one’s attention—opening and narrowing it as needed. And the ability to control one’s attention is perhaps the single most important quality of the creative mind. I, on the other hand, felt I was living in a constant state of what researcher Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention,” never fully tuned in to anything, but always partially tuned in to everything.

A big part of being a successful writer is and has always been the ability to push everything else aside to do your work. There’s an old story about Gustave Flaubert who, one Friday in the mid-1800s, was sitting at his desk when some friends stopped by and asked if he wanted to join them for a weekend outing. Flaubert said he couldn’t because he had too much work to do. When his friends got back from their trip and asked what he’d written, they saw he was still in the same place—in midsentence, ending with a comma. Flaubert, however, was extremely happy with his “wonderful progress.” On Saturday, he said, he’d changed the comma to a semicolon. On Sunday he’d put the comma back.

Needless to say, times have changed. Yet it’s hard to imagine we’d still be reading Flaubert if he’d spent the whole weekend toggling back and forth between Gawker and Facebook. While he made hard choices for his craft, there was another struggle he didn’t have to make: Distractions were not emerging from the very paper he wrote on, interrupting his work, short-circuiting his focus, trying to turn his precious attention into page views.

Choosing what you pay attention to isn’t as easy as it was then, and there is a biological basis for this: We actually have two different attention systems that work at cross-purposes in our minds. One is the “top-down” executive attention of which we are in charge. That is the system we use when we focus and push ourselves forward toward some goal: reading a book, writing a draft, learning a skill, accomplishing a task. The other is a “bottom-up” system, driven primarily by external stimuli—distractions, things that catch our eye: the tiger stalking, a car approaching, the dancing woman on the real estate ad.

These two systems exist in different parts of our brains, and the bottom-up system actually has a circuit-breaker effect on the top-down system. Sitting in front of my computer, I could feel these two pulling me in opposite directions—or, more accurately, I could feel my top-down system being swamped by distraction from the bottom. It was “completely overwhelming,” as David Foster Wallace described it in a conversation with David Lipsky, which is recorded in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace (Broadway Books, 2010). “There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99 percent of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide.”

Quite possibly I was just lacking the willpower to function in the modern world. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I knew I had to do something to try to balance the public and the private spaces, to protect the place Lessing says inspiration comes from, to get out of what novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer calls the “cathedral of distraction” and back into that “place of stillness that allows you to hear yourself think, to come to decisions you trust and to cut through all the clutter and complication of the everyday to see what matters and what will last.”

I wondered how other writers were walking this high wire, so I sent out an e-mail to some people I knew, asking if they were having the same issues, if they worried about the intrusion of the world into their writing space, or if they’d found some way to deal with it that I hadn’t thought of. After all, not everyone sees this the same way.

Some connectophiles, such as Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead Books, 2010), and Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (Penguin Press, 2010), are relentless cheerleaders for the Internet’s benefits, saying we all gain inexorably from the rapid, constant exchange of ideas online. Shirky even goes so far as to suggest there’s no such thing as information overload. (I wanted to ask him about this, but he didn’t return my e-mails.)

Another person I wanted to talk to was Susan Orlean, author most recently of Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend (Simon & Schuster, 2011), who as of this writing has over two hundred thousand followers on Twitter and maintains a huge online footprint while also keeping up an oddly high level of productivity. In addition to writing books, she regularly files stories for the New Yorker, writes blog posts, converses with Twitter followers, and keeps everyone constantly updated on the details of her life.

“I think writing always requires the kind of focus that being a living human makes challenging,” she says, “whether it’s the distraction of friends, or if you’re in an office with people, or if you work at home.” Orlean sets a writing quota of a thousand words per day to help her stay on task. But even so, she says lately she’s felt that struggle more acutely. “Partly I think the ratio of productive time to wasted time is always the same, but there are different ways you spend it. And then sometimes I think the Internet is like when Odysseus is in a boat passing the sirens, and if you turn your head that way, you’ll be trapped forever.”

As long as writers have been writing, they have been fending off distractions. But the question is whether there is something particularly damaging to the creative process about having four trillion bits of information streaming into our computers, landing right in the middle of the place where our serious thinking is supposed to occur, pulling us up out of the depths. That is, I think, what Spanbauer was worried about all those years ago.

Responses to my e-mail began to trickle in. Some people wrote back right away. Others after a few days. A few not at all. Most of the people who replied were ambivalent; some didn’t really see all this as much of a problem. Benjamin Percy, whose third book, the novel The Wilding, was published by Graywolf Press in 2010, wrote, “Even if I’m online, I’ll only have Google open, which is my oracle: What’s the name of that river? What’s blooming in the mountains in August? Was this weapon manufactured before 1950? Which is hugely helpful. I’m not the kind of person who gets lost in research, who clicks on page after page of information. I get in, I get out.”

Percy, like Orlean, also cited the need to have an online presence—something that many writers feel pressured to do. This is one of the paradoxes of writing in the digital age: We feel the need to find some sort of platform off which to launch our work. But what good is a platform if all you have to put on it are small insights, clever turns of phrase, and status updates?

“A lot of the deepest reservoirs of memory and thought you can only tap into when you pay deep attention to something,” Carr told me. “As a writer, a big danger of being constantly connected and distracted is that you risk losing some of that depth. There’s also some evidence that if you’re continually distracted and multitasking, you don’t tend to think in original ways. You kind of follow existing channels of thought, the common wisdom. And I think as a writer it’s extremely important to get outside of that.”

Monica Drake, author of Clown Girl (Hawthorne Books, 2007), voiced a similar concern. “Van Gogh warned Gauguin not to have sex so often,” she says. “He felt it robbed Gauguin’s work of energy, said his paintings would be more ‘spermatic’ if he held back. I’ve started to sense that about Facebook. All the short, quick ejaculations of status updates may be sapping the power out of considered ideas.”

Maybe this isn’t a problem for certain creatively virile writers, but others of us feel it acutely. Stephanie Elizondo Griest, author of Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines (Atria Books, 2008), says that she’s had to swear off wireless technology completely. Sefi Atta, whose second novel, Swallow, was published by Interlink Books in 2010, writes her first drafts on a computer with no Internet connection at all. She says she needs to be connected only to her characters; everyone else gets cut off.

“I remember one morning I worked for an hour straight,” says Dennis Cass, author of Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain (HarperCollins, 2007). “I was so proud of myself. And I thought, ‘This is crazy. This is psychotic. Something is deeply wrong with me, and it’s my fault that I let it get to this.’” Cass considered “neutering” his computer, but instead found an office with no wireless Internet, which he called his “productivity cave.”

David Farley, author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town (Gotham Books, 2009), perhaps put it best: “Being connected and being on social media,” he wrote, “is like having a line of cocaine laid out next to me. After I snort it up and reopen the Word document I was writing in, another line is laid out for me and, after writing just a few lines, I can feel it staring at me, taunting and mocking me. I don’t do cocaine, but it might be more productive than being connected on social media.”

Was that it? Was I just mainlining trivia? Jonesing on the never-ending stream of junk? Surely there was good stuff there—lots of it, stuff I couldn’t live without. But how, then, could I live with it? I knew I didn’t want to be a digital crack head, always thinking about my next fix. I didn’t want to become, as Csikszentmihalyi suggested, the equivalent of a software application servicing the needs of the Internet. I wanted to be a writer, a thinker, not just a typist ejaculating the first spermatic idea that came into my head. I wanted to find my way back to Lessing’s space, where I could let my mind run over ideas the way a river runs over stones.

Obviously, this problem was caused by technology. So maybe it was in technology that I could find a solution. I started sampling the growing list of antidistraction programs—Freedom, LeechBlock, WriteRoom, Isolator—until I finally found what I was looking for: SelfControl. Not the respectable, old-fashioned, internal kind, but rather an elegant application named for precisely the thing that I lacked. It blocks all Wi-Fi signals for a predetermined period of time and allows me to do what I can’t do on my own without turning into the Unabomber: Shut off the Internet in an ironclad, irreversible way. I just set a timer, hit start, then listen as the cacophony falls away and a silent space opens into which I can hear words, thoughts, ideas emerge. Alone in there, I feel something start to grow that hasn’t for a long time: inspiration.

Frank Bures is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.