The number one unwritten unspoken rule in grad school is, you never ask a colleague how their writing is going. It happens from time to time, especially among English majors because most of us are awkward introverts who don’t know what else to talk about. And when it does happen, you’re likely to hear some version of one of these two answers: 1-(the lie)-“it’s going great” and 2-(the truth)-gentle weeping followed by words indicating self-loathing and some degree of imposter syndrome. I’ve thought a lot about this lately because I’ve recently switched camps. During the first 2 years of my PhD program, my answer always fell in the truth category: “I started a few things but abandoned them because all my ideas suck” or “everything I write is crap, so I haven’t written anything in 3 months.” Now, I lie: “It’s going great. Thanks for asking.”
Why is it this way? I mean, we’re all writers, so why aren’t we excited to talk about our writing? The even scarier question is, why aren’t we writing? This is where I think something like a Fitbit could help.
One of my favorite CNF pieces is an essay written by David Sedaris titled “Stepping Out: Living the Fitbit Life.” For those of you not familiar with the Fitbit, it is basically a tricked-out pedometer with Bluetooth which allows it to ‘talk’ to the companion app on a smartphone. I just looked to see how old the Sedaris essay is and was surprised to see it appeared in The New Yorker in June of 2014. Surprised, because things like Fitbits often go out of fashion pretty quickly. I’ve found that nearly all health and fitness fads have a super short shelf life, but maybe the Fitbit doesn’t quite fit into the category of fad because it straddles the line between fitness and electronics. And we all know how addicted we can become to our electronics. Even though I’ve never waited in line for a new iPhone or paid for an ad free subscription to Pandora, I love both things and can’t imagine the degree to which my quality of life would suffer without them.
I’ve begun to feel the same way about my Fitbit. I got my first one long ago when the technology was new. This was back when they were just the thin plastic bracelets Sedaris talks about in his essay, with glowing dots that lit up to indicate how many steps you’ve walked. Back then, it was like being in a club. Someone would see me wearing my Fitbit and excitedly ask me if we could be ‘friends.’ What that means is that you and this other person connect through the app which is where the Fitbit dumps all of your information onto a neat little dashboard which tells you exactly how many steps you’ve taken. And if you have ‘friends,’ they get to see how many steps you took at the end of the week too.
My current Fitbit is thicker than the first one I had, and no longer has little dots. It tells me the time, date, my heart rate, how soon I have to charge it, and of course, how many steps I’ve taken in bold and easy to read numbers. And now, my ‘friends’ can invite me to participate in challenges, where I can see their step counts in real time, and at the end of the week, the one who walked the most wins a virtual badge. It’s exciting stuff. This is where I sometimes feel a modicum of the obsession that Sedaris explains in his essay. For me, trying to win these challenges is often what motivates me to get me out of my chair and walk. The thrill of competition keeps me going at times I’d rather sit in front of the television and eat chips.
What I guess I’m proposing here, is a Fitbit for writers. We could call it a WritBit, or the Punctuator. Something that would track my writing in real time and report these numbers to my ‘friends’ to keep me accountable. This might be exactly what we all need to keep our competitive sides motivated. Even if it didn’t inspire us to talk about our writing in a productive manner, at least we’d be thinking about writing and trying to reach goals that we currently don’t have. I’d like to think that seeing the word counts of the more prolific producers of writing in my grad program might give me the kick in the ass I need to abandon the TV screen and sit at my computer instead.
But how would this work? Maybe strap on a GoPro style camera to count the words on the screen or page in front of you? Run wire sensors to your fingertips which can sense how many words you’ve written or typed? Or would this type of technology prove to be far more of a fad than the Fitbit? Is this something that would just make us all feel even more wildly inadequate than being asked how’s your writing going, thus forcing us to abandon it in a drawer the first time the battery dies and needs charging? I don’t know. I argue it would be an interesting experiment to try. I think it might be just the thing for someone like me who needs something more than the internal drive to tell my stories, or the external motivation of a degree and publication. It might be just the thing to get me to quit lying and actually write something.
Heather Humphrey
is currently working on a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University. She is the Editor-in-Chief for Harpur Palate, director of the Binghamton Poetry Project, fiction editor at Ragazine, and Editor-at-Large for Street Light Press. Having just decided to leave her other job after fifteen years, she decided to join a motorcycle gang and remodel her house to fill the void. Heather lives in Kattelville, NY with her husband.