Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
Writing a book consists largely of avoiding distractions. If you can forget your real circumstances and submerge yourself in your subject for hours every day, characters become more human, sentences become clearer and prettier. But utter devotion to the principle that distraction is Satan and writing is paramount can be just as poisonous as an excess of diversion. I tried to make writing my only god, and it sickened my work, for a while. The condition endemic to my generation, attention deficit disorder, gave way to its insidious Victorian foil: monomania.
Monomania is what it sounds like: a pathologically intense focus on one thing. It’s the opposite of the problem you have if your gaze is ever flitting from your Tumblr to your spreadsheet to your baby to rush-hour traffic. It’s the opposite of the problem you have, in other words, if you are a normal, contemporary, non-agrarian 30-something. It was when I left Los Angeles for the primeval hush of the Midwest that I became a monomaniac.
I got into a master’s program in fiction and moved to a college town on the prairie. On my stipend, I was able to live like an unprosperous gentleman-landowner of 19th-century Russia. There was nothing to do besides read, write, reflect on God and drink. It was a circumstance favorable to writing fiction. But it was also conducive to depravity, the old Calvinist definition thereof: a warping of the spirit.
I didn’t set up an Internet connection. I didn’t have a TV or an iPhone. For hundreds of miles in every direction, none of the movie theaters were playing movies I wanted to see. There were dangerous roads, there was dangerous weather. I spent my days scribbling longhand, as snow piled up against my house and made high branches slap against my windows. I was embowered in the graces of Turgenev’s age.
When I socialized, it was often with poets, who confirmed by their very existence that I had landed in a better, vanished time. Even their physical ailments were of the 19th century. One day, in the depths of winter, I came upon one of them picking his way across the snow and ice on crutches, pausing to drag on his cigarette.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“I have gout,” he said, his tone hail-fellow-well-met. “It still happens, apparently.”
The disaster unfolded slowly. The professors and students were diplomatic, but a pall of boredom fell over the seminar table when my work was under discussion. I could see everyone struggling to care. And then, trying feverishly to write something that would engage people, I got worse. First my writing became overthought, and then it went rank with the odor of desperation. It got to the point that every chapter, short story, every essay was trash.
I could not imagine why; conditions were ideal. It took me a long time to realize that the utter domination of my consciousness by the desire to write well was itself the problem. Monomania, a 19th-century malady to which my 21st-century immune system had developed no defenses, had crept into my soul, like gout into a poet’s foot, and spoiled it by degrees.
When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I wanted to see or what I feared to see.
It’s no coincidence, I imagine, that writers of the 19th century wrote deathless novels about monomania. When Ahab speaks of the white whale, he shouts “with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose.” Victor Frankenstein, longing to “penetrate the secrets of nature,” and idolizing “men who had penetrated deeper and knew more,” grows “pale with study” and “emaciated from confinement.”
There is a scene in “War and Peace” in which Napoleon is so focused on reaching Moscow, so busy with his map and field glass, that he barely notices a group of his soldiers, Polish Uhlans, who have tried to impress him by attempting to cross a frigid river. Forty of them drown or freeze to death to show him their valor. “The little man in the gray overcoat,” writes Tolstoy, “began pacing up and down the bank… occasionally glancing disapprovingly at the drowning Uhlans, who distracted his attention.” Tolstoy ends the chapter with a Latin quote that applies to the soldiers and their leader both: “Quos vult perdere dementat.” Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad.
When Napoleon’s army takes Moscow, it loses its discipline, starts looting and begins to fall apart. When Frankenstein’s creature opens its eyes, Frankenstein is repulsed and runs away. Ahab’s confrontation with his whale does not restore his self-esteem.
I purged myself of monomania — slowly, and somewhat unwittingly. I fell in love, an overpowering diversion, and began to spend more time at my girlfriend’s place, where she had Wi-Fi, a flat-screen TV and a DVD player. I joined a cover band that held live karaoke parties. One morning, after I diversified my mania, my writing no longer stank of decay. Eventually, it sat up and took food.
I’m glad I went to 19th-century Russia. But I wish I had been more careful, more humble, and kept one foot in modernity. The thing about 19th-century Russia is that if you race in, heedless of all but conquest and glory, you get stuck.
Benjamin Nugent is the author of the novel “Good Kids .”