That's me and my wife, circa 1987, Albany, New York. We were just finishing up our creative writing Masters at Syracuse – actually I had a year left and she was moving on to study with Toni Morrison at SUNY Albany. And I think she was pregnant with our first daughter, Caitlin. If we juxtaposed a photo of me now with that one, we could call it "The Surly Tragic Passage of Time".

My wife, alas, looks pretty much exactly the same now as she did then. Both good for me ("I am married to a beauty!") and bad for me ("O, Paula, is this your father? Poor thing seems to have been the victim of a shipwreck.") I remember it as a really hopeful, beautiful time. We had only met a year before, were all fired up about life and love and art. We got engaged in three weeks, pregnant on the honeymoon – and then, I suppose not long after the photo was taken, Paula went into (very) early labour, while we were driving through the Black Hills in South Dakota (where she's from).

So she had to go to bed for the rest of the pregnancy, on an anti-contraction drug that has since been outlawed for causing heart attacks. Amazing, really, how at any given moment a person can't even begin to imagine what lies ahead. (By the way, that endangered baby is now a beautiful, happy 24-year-old.) I think we have to be frugal with our photo-viewing. I love it when you find a photo from a time you've forgotten about – one that, maybe, someone else had possession of. It makes you realise how linear and reductive memory is.

Novelists Junot Diaz, Rick Moody, Edwidge Danticat, David Foster Wallace, Jeff Eugenides, and George Saunders Photograph: George Saunders

I had this photograph (above) in my office for years but never looked at it, and just the other day caught sight of it. It's from 1999. The New Yorker had this "Twenty Best Writers Under 40" issue and gathered those of us who were chosen for a group photo – this is a quarter of us. Seeing this, how young we all were, was sort of shocking and bittersweet. That's (left to right) Junot Díaz, Rick Moody, Edwidge Danticat, David Foster Wallace, Jeff Eugenides, and Chuck Norris. Er, me.

My desktop looks organised, but I don't think I'm very organised; rather, maybe, I don't use my computer for much. I do note that the items on the right-hand side are very, uh, linear. So that may be more "obsessive" than "organised". In real life I'm kind of a list-completer and I tend to have pretty high energy. So, just now, for example, I was alphabetising the items in the refrigerator. Before that, I'd had them organised by colour, which really didn't make sense. Ha ha. The one thing I am trying to do in my "real" life is simplify. There are really only a handful of things I care about, so I'm trying to minimise the distractions associated with the other things. It's basically: family, writing, teaching.

I'm not easily distracted, as a rule. Especially where writing is concerned. But I have noticed, over the last few years, the very real (what feels like) neurological effect of the computer and the iPhone and texting and so on – it feels like I've re-programmed myself to become discontent with whatever I'm doing faster. So I'm trying to work against this by checking emails less often, etc etc. It's a little scary, actually, to observe oneself getting more and more skittish, attention-wise. I really don't know if people are "deep reading" less these days in favour of a quick fix on the internet – I think this is a thing one hears a lot, but when I travel to colleges here in the US there are always people reading Joyce and DFW and debating about literary difficulty and praising William Gaddis and so on.

I do know that I started noticing a change in my own reading habits – I'd get online and look up and 40 minutes would have gone by, and my reading time for the night would have been pissed away, and all I would have learned was that, you know, a certain celebrity had lived in her car awhile, or that a cat had dialled 911. So I had to start watching that more carefully. But it's interesting because (1) this tendency does seem to alter brain function and (2) through some demonic cause-and-effect, our technology is exactly situated to exploit the crappier angles of our nature: gossip, self-promotion, snarky curiosity. It's almost as if totalitarianism thought better of the jackboots and decided to go another way: smoother, more flattering – and impossible to resist.

Twitter is a deliberate abstention. Somehow I hate the idea of there always being, in the back of my mind, this little voice saying: "Oh, I should tweet about this." Which knowing me, I know there would be. I'm sure some people can do it in a fun and healthy way, but I don't think I could. Plus, it's kind of funny – I've spent my whole life learning to write very slowly, for maximum expressiveness, and for money. So the idea of writing really quickly, for free, offends me. Also, one of the simplify-life things I'm doing is to try to just write fiction, period. There was a time there a few years back where I was writing humour, and screenplays, and travel journalism so on – just trying to keep the juices flowing and kick open some new doors. These, in turn, led to a period of sort of higher public exposure – TV appearances here in the US and some quasi-pundit-like moments. To be honest, this made me feel kind of queasy. I'm not that good on my feet and I found that I really craved the feeling of deep focus and integrity that comes with writing fiction day after day, in a sort of monastic way. So that's what I'm trying to do now, as much as I can manage. And Twitter doesn't figure into that.

I write in Word. I loved WordPerfect but then the Word juggernaut rolled right over the poor little guy. This computer is given to me by my university and the default word-processing program is Word – so there you go. The only thing I ever write longhand anymore are notebook entries. And even then I usually end up typing them into a file. I have really horrible handwriting. I print out every day so there's no danger of losing anything. And lots of times, in retrospect, it might have been better if I had lost something.

"Audacity" is rudimentary recording software. I play music and got that to goof around with. I've since replaced it with full-blown recording software (Logic Express) on an iMac in our basement. Recording is a nice chance to remind myself of what real humiliation feels like.

"InfanView" is an app that produces a list of all babies born in your area, ranks them for cuteness, and auto-sends each one a Facebook Friend request on your behalf. It's good for building up one's "fan base." Ha. No – I think it's "IrfanView", and I honestly have no idea what the hell it is. I just went in and opened it and still have no idea. It's a relic of something, but I don't know what.

I never listen to music when I write. I always felt that it had the effect of creating artificial wings for your prose. Like, if you listen to Stand Up and Be Strong by Soul Asylum, while reading your prose, it will always sound uplifting. Even the phonebook reads as uplifting when you listen to that song. There's almost nothing in that iTunes. Part of the Simplicity Initiative. "Daydreaming" is a really nice CSNY-ish song by a band called Middle Brother, that my daughter turned me on to. I think it's on my desktop because I was, in my Luddite way, cloddishly trying to send it to a friend. Picture a caveman trying to send a fax.

Those icons on the right-hand side are all travel pieces I did for GQ. I keep the pdfs there so I can send them out easily for people who missed them in the magazine and ask about them. The Bill Clinton one, for instance, involved going on this whirlwind tour, with Clinton, of some of the spots in Africa where the Clinton Foundation was working. It is a really amazing group, made up of young consulting types, mostly. They specialise in these sort of low-hanging fruit projects – for example, they arranged for generic drug manufacturers in India to make ARV drugs available at a fraction of the drug company price, and even the most conservative estimates say this has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. On that trip we toured a classroom: all of these adorable five and six-year-olds running around in their Sunday best. And they were all on ARVs that they wouldn't have had access to without the Foundation's intervention, ie they would have been all dead or dying soon. So that was a great trip – it revived some optimistic part of me. Clinton is an amazing person. At one point he hadn't slept in like 30 hours and I heard him very articulately discussing the fine details of the history of ATMs in Malawi. It's a perfect mission for his set of skills. The other pieces were all in that Braindead Megaphone book except for the one called "Tent City", which was the story of going to live in a homeless camp in Fresno, California, incognito.

I don't own a Kindle. I love carrying a book around. I went to Asia last winter and took Infinite Jest along and got a lot of pleasure just out of lugging it around.