Digital can distract both writer and reader

David Nicholls writes at the cutting edge of contemporary fiction. He is a bestselling author as well as a literary heavyweight. His last novel One Day became an instant popular classic and was made into a film last year starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, while his latest, Us, was long-listed for the Booker Prize.

Yet even Nicholls has faced the crippling anxiety of writer's block. He recently revealed that he struggled to put pen to paper after the success of One Day, and that he turned to digital devices for a solution. Lacking an internal impetus for self-regulation, Nicholls downloaded a software program called Write or Die, which is designed to start deleting text if you don't write enough within a set time frame. It put a virtual "gun to my head", Nicholls said, and allowed him to write rapidly in a condensed time frame, but the results were decidedly mixed. "I wrote 35,000 words," he said. "And every one was agony." What he wrote was also "absolute rubbish".

Although that first beginning to Us ended up in the bin, it was a start and Nicholl's continued to look to the internet to enable the novel's completion. Fearing digital distraction, he installed two other computer programmes, Freedom and Self-Control, which attempt to cure writer's block by blocking access to the internet.

Nicholls is not alone among contemporary writers in admitting how instant access to news and knowledge gets in the way of the writing life. In the acknowledgments to her latest novel NW, Zadie Smith gives thanks to the same computer apps for "creating the time" to finish the book; she values their removal of digital distraction as highly as the support of family and friends.

Smith writes about the internet's pernicious influence on our intellectual lives within NW too: despite her erudition and education, the lawyer-character of Natalie can't tear herself away from internet sex message boards. However, as much as the internet is affecting the ability of writers to write, it is also affecting our capacity to read. Digital text is slowly changing the way our brain approaches the task.

Fragmented approach

Where reading a paperback text is for the most part a linear experience, digital reading takes a more fragmented approach. Scrolling, tapping, searching, highlighting all have their advantages, but it is difficult to take stock of the overall context when navigating through long texts on a screen.

If you are reading Rebecca in its traditional format, the materiality of the book allows you to place the dramatic climax within the greater frame of the fiction. In its ebook form, the atmosphere of suspense evaporates as soon as you swipe your way onto the next page.

Of course, the internet offers its own solutions and there are a proliferation of apps designed to help you read more efficiently with your digital device. Most of them are designed in line, with ‘rapid serial visual presentation’ (RSVP) in mind, which focuses the eye on a single recognition point on the screen. Because the visual point remains fixed, the eye can refocus on words at a faster pace.

ReadMe! is an app for iPhones inspired by RSVP that allows you to set and test your reading pace. You select an ebook from your own library and it feeds the book to you word by word at a speed of your choosing.

The app’s function is controlled by tapping the keyboard/keypad, and the relationship between the physical and the visual allows you to minimise distractions. Spreed is a similar program available across all web browsers.

ReadQuick takes a different approach. It allows you to take articles, news feeds or other material into its program and set a time limit for reading. A timer at the bottom of the screen keeps you updated on your progress. It encourages you to read at a certain pace, but also to focus for a set length of time, something those who are easily distracted will appreciate. There are dozens more programs available: from those that allow you to determine how many words are displayed at a time to those that have inbuilt speed test functions.

Of course quantity is different to quality, and speed reading is thought to inhibit rather than enhance understanding. Early research suggests that digital reading offers surface engagement rather than deep understanding. Writer Will Self, who has often proclaimed the death of the novel and blamed the internet for it, certainly thinks this is the case.

However, he believes it is the fault of writers themselves, who have been “inelastic” in their approach to the new challenges: what is needed, he argues, is a new form of writing, a new language, to reinvigorate or redefine literary culture. But the nature of writing and reading are inextricably linked. Soon there will be no point in producing literary work, he concludes, “because such writing depends for its existence on deep readers, and in the near future such deep readers will be in very short supply”.