This morning I got started a little late, but I worked for two hours and fifteen minutes, which was great! The only downside is I didn’t get to an actual script because I worked on my column the entire time. Well, that wasn’t actually the only downside. I also got no breakfast. I think tomorrow I’ll prepare breakfast first and eat it while I write. Then I spent another 25 minutes online during my lunch hour cross-pollinating the news that my new column was up through my entire digital shadow. Including here. But the column’s worth the time. It’s an amazing learning and networking opportunity rolled up into one. I basically ask the writers who interest me the things I personally want to know…then share.
Tomorrow will be my earliest morning yet: I’ll have to be up at 5am in order to write before work. I can only hope I’ll get myself to bed at a sensible hour tonight.
I’m working on the idea of song triggers to enter my mental workspace (see here and here for more of my own musings on a “mental office”). This idea first blipped on my radar when I interviewed John Rogers for my column. This is the pertinent bit:
“Here’s the thing. It never gets easy. It’s ALWAYS easier to do ANYTHING but write. I have little cues. A timer on my cell phone, certain tunes on my iPod. I fire those up, and years of creating associated habits help me slide into my mental writing zone. You see, when I was a stand-up comic, I was always on the road. I had no office, so I constantly had to create this sort of traveling mental “space” that my brain associated with writing. My friend Mike is always horrified that I’ll go to a mall, sometimes, and write in the food court. But I did that for years as a comic, and sometimes it’s just better that way.”
Then this past weekend I read On Writing
This reminded me again of Rogers’s mention of certain tunes on his iPod as mental cues, and “I’m Ready” seemed a very appropriate one for My Leap Year. So every day when I sit down to write I play that song first thing. I’m seeing if I can establish it as an engram, a “switch” that will help me jump from the outside world into my mental office that much faster. We’ll have to see how it goes.
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I really like this idea of mental triggers. I read “Comic Writers on Script-writing for Comics” (or whatever the weird title for it was) a few weeks back and Devin Grayson did it a bit differently.
She actually created play lists for the different types of writing she did.
I think both these ideas are very useful, and only trial and error can perfect it, but I think it’d be something I could integrate into my own writing habits.
If I start making full playlists, then I get too sucked in to what I’m doing and suddenly I’m not writing anymore…I’m making playlists. I’m good enough at distracting myself without adding to it. So just the one trigger song for me right now. But let me know how your own experiments fare.
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[...] Of course, I didn’t write today, either. Except for those first two days, I’m having a real tough time with these early mornings. I’ve observed in the past that, left to my own devices, I tend to write most naturally between 2 and 6 in the afternoon. But my shifts at work either end at 6 or start at 2, so obviously that won’t work. As I was thinking the situation over in the shower this morning (I do a lot of great thinking in the shower), I remembered another passage from the same John Rogers interview I referred to a couple weeks ago: [...]