By HD Silversmith
One of the things that Anne Lamott writes so well about in Bird by Bird is the inner noise that sometimes confronts us when we sit down to write. Often we're our own worst enemies when it comes to getting focused:
"You try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind ... There may be a Nurse Ratched -- like listings of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at your desk."
I've certainly got my own Nurse Ratched striding around in my head, and sometimes her voice is very loud, indeed. But what do we do about those voices if we can't shut them up? How do we hold that metaphoric gun to our heads?
The way I look at it is, these inner voices want to be heard.
Sometimes they're whispering to us about our deepest fears and insecurities about writing, and sometimes they're masquerading as reminders about what we really ought to be doing instead. Either way, like all voices, they crave a listener.
So I'll listen -- but not forever. I'll listen for exactly as long as it takes for me to hear the anxiety and reframe it ( "I'm worried that I'm no good, but in fact, past experience has shown this not to be true. The more writing I do, the better I'll get, so I'm going to write that next sentence now ...").
Or, if it's one of those fears masquerading as something terribly urgent (like "Wow, my computer screen is really dusty. I should really clean it first"), then I'll write it down on a to-do- list for later. If it's truly something that needs doing, I can refer to the list later and perform the task. If it's not, then no harm done: I wrote it down and got it out of my head, and now the decks are cleared for the writing I'm there to do.
Generally I keep these lists on pieces of recycled scrap paper, just jotting down the thought as it occurs to me and moving forward. Here are some items I hastily scrawled on just such a piece of paper while I was working on finalizing the first draft of the 30-page article I finished last week:
- Record Punctum post idea
- Pre-post Salzburg schedule to Punctum [more on that in forthcoming entries]
- Download TweetDeck to Acer
- Put cover on Acer
In fact, they're all tasks I wanted to accomplish -- just not at the cost of my writing. Using the approach of a keeping a to-do list as I wrote, I was able to stay focused, finish the article, and complete the tasks that drifted into my mind.
Everything -- the writing and the tasks -- got done.
