Do you compose in snippets? Or need a flat-out stretch of time? Only when alone? Need noise around?
I was recently pondering how one functions best in whatever one is habituated to. If one is used to living a narrow grid with corrective buzzers and cutoffs and constraints, one learns a thought habit compatible with the regimented externally-disrupted/controlled routine. When given an open field, how to orient and pace oneself? If one is used to not needing time and space management, the sudden imposition abrades. One adapts fairly quickly.
Judy McCrosky was thinking about distractions and her optimal environment for writing and how that’s shifted for her. [thanks to Brenda for pointing out.]
I got used to having chunks of time between 3 and 10 hours long. Long time isn’t the same as effective time. My own breath became disruptive, and my back and my hunger or thirst or bladder but basically I could govern the time as I needed. I could pursue a thought without penalty, do shuffle work on one line for hours if need be.
If I’m nervous all my senses being turned up means I can get distracted by sound or movement easily. I’d prefer utter silence. Especially no music. Language around me I can screen out but rhythms of music displace writing. Once I screen it out I can write but it uses mental energy to do that and I tire faster.
I thought I needed a quiet environment but that wasn’t the most salient element. Noise in the street that doesn’t pertain to me doesn’t disrupt work. (Sleep yes, work, no.) Music impairs function. A burst of it can bind up some stray emotional energy and chelate it from the system but that is in a break from composition or editing.
I realized that I could work easily in bustle or among a low buzz. (One loud talker in a room doesn’t work tho especially writing in restaurants when the anecdotes told were hands down more interesting than anything I could come up with. Then I had to switch to Henry Higgins’ role.)
Whether I could fall into a flow was more a result of my default priorities. Priorities that worked when we saw each other a couple hours a day have to shift now that it’s 24/7. I was used to weighing any sound of hubby as being communicative and trump-worthy of anything I might be doing. We were used to having little time together so hearing each other’s voice always meant one of us was addressing the other. However we both mutter to ourselves as we work. We have to learn to screen each other out for certain hours.
That realization applies outwards as well. Email doesn’t distract unless I take on the emotional attachment of wanting to help someone with something. That case throws me into unsettled state of fret in which I can’t prioritize fiction (prose or poetry) because real life wins. It is a matter of deciding “real life” doesn’t always have to win. Sometimes I can elect to finish my pursuit and let the various household beepers beep to their non-heart’s content. Phone already has a system for collecting messages. Notes can go under the door.
Whatever random happenstance doesn’t need to set the agenda and overturn my apple cart. I’ve been spending my time picking up the same increasingly bruised apples over and over.
Being too responsive is futile and unnecessary. It is a sort of egocentricity to think that being asked something requires a yes.
It’s been hard to piece together,
with the habit changes of the past year.
Seems like stripes:
—jotting on the pad through the day
–transcription time (plus expansion)
–bulk reworks (each piece cools at least 2
days) Bulk reworks (fix the obvious)
are extremely productive but exhausting.
Spending too long on a stage seems to
turn it to mush. They all seem to live
somewhere in the back mind
Spending over a minute on the jot really
plays havoc. It’s been 2 years cutting
that time down.
hm, that’s a good point. moving it on down the line in a timely way could be key good practice.
true enough. it’s funny. poets mostly can talk without hindrance but reading their own work words go all snaky.
speaking before a group can make parts stand out as working or not.
can’t edit to final based on one group and day and time since what will fly in one case, won’t in the next but you can winnow out the ones that fall flat or tick as keepers lines that fly.
Ah, that could be a factor…different edit times
and moods for a more stable product
that ‘rings true’.
That “first minute damage” prevents effective
use of a recorder. There is a tendency to
‘ham it up’. A lot of warm beer instead of
the distilled drips off a pen. I like the
bottleneck of the pen.
yes, that too. I was thinking that the group mind of any given audience will respond differently but it holds true that to edit across various moods should level out to something more reliably good as well.
hamming it up can be good. losing the ham is one of the losses of overpolishing. words taking themselves too seriously. if a joke works once, sometimes that’s ok. other things can go on and be deeper or more pleasurable with each read.
a pen as a bottleneck. since I often write with a keyboard, I guess my equivalent is getting crumbed up. 😉
Likely needs a tweeking to the individual.
My inner Shatner launches into
“Mr. Tambourine Man” given enough dead air.
Then there is the overall ‘type’. I think we are
both ‘internally prolific’. Others have a slow
idea rate, so they work on one piece alone
for weeks. I have even seen a few ‘blurters’:
they push out the unvarnished inner
conversation in one shot, and recommend
tossing the whole thing out instead of fixing
it. One said the truth decays with rework.
(the opposite of what I think, in terms of
transmitting it: I know my thoughts, after all..
..the trouble is, how can I induce it in you)