It’s been very hard to keep my focus and my momentum due to circumstances you all know, but I think I am over the hump and still making sense. I’ll of course do a running rewrite to be sure everything makes the sense I think it does, but I think I am on track.
I wish there were more hours in the day. I take breaks, and appear not to be writing, but the hindbrain is working, and when next I key onto the manuscript, the resolution to what stopped me will be there: it’s amazing how much complex work the lower brain can do without notifying the forebrain that it’s happening. Connections happen; things that don’t make sense suddenly make sense…
The best way I can explain it is something everybody does experience: when you dream, objects turn up when you need them, or they haven’t been there, but suddenly the dream revises itself and it’s always been true, making things make sense for the moment. The brain keeps trying to assemble data, even when it’s not receiving input: it arranges things together and, out of the fund of unused bits and bobs of ideas, or perceived needs or relationships between things, assembles them into a patchwork order that makes increasing sense, within the context of the dream.
Writing is dreaming awake. You don’t know how you’re going to get out of the mess you’ve created, but all of a sudden the idea is there, and if you hammer it too hard with your intellectual function, you’re going to forget something or take a wrong fork in the road and get stuck. Let dream-state solve it, and it will come up with pieces that surprise and please you. This is why banniks exist in showers, to give you inspirations; this is why when you really, really get stuck, you lie down to take a nap, your head hits the pillow, and boink! you’re wide awake instantly and in possession of the answer you were after.
I worry about today’s generation, with its flood of music, noise, input, chatter, chatter, chatter, not to mention (ugh!) structured play activity. Hindbrain work functions best in reasonable quiet and non-structure, and is even controllable. We call it daydreaming, when you dive into hindbrain activity and are somewhere else for a while. Ideas happen, crosslinks between parts of the brain that haven’t said hello to each other in hours. I don’t think it’s meditation. Meditation is too much like work. This is unadulterated walking barefoot through the meadows of the mind and waiting for encounters.
It’s a peaceful place to go (Bren would disagree at the moment) and you are absolute king or queen of the universe while you’re there. It’s where the ego lives—mine occupies a waterfall pool at the center of it all, and is always exploring things. And ideas keep floating up out of that depth, so I never worry about being stuck: worry makes you sink, and you’ll just get frustrated. Think buoyant thoughts, listen to the water, and wait. Something will come bobbing up—but you may have to chase it before you get a good look at it. And it may mutate four and five times while you’re chasing it, but it will only get more useful in the process. 😉
Many people think writers are a little crazy. Yep, but it’s a good crazy.
I wonder if Einstein had to work excessively on his Special Theory of Relativity while working as the patent clerk. Maybe the job was so dull, he could let his forebrain take over his everyday stuff, and let the hindbrain wander where it would. They thought he was stupid in school, but my thought is, he was bored. I think schools and psychologists are too quick to label kids who seem to “check out” more often than others as ADHD. Maybe they’re like I was in school, bored out of my socks, but because Sister Mary Discipline had her steel ruler, I couldn’t ACT bored.
I still like going to that state of mind where I don’t think, just let things come together and the wonderful feeling you get when that “Aha!” moment strikes is something. Whoopee for woolgathering! Hurray for having daydreams.
WAAAYyyy too many kids are told they’re adhd when the simple problem is, they’re thinking.
I suppose that it’s better than locking Ms. Cherryh in a room until she produces a new work.
In the final analysis, it is a wonderful combination of education, brains, and imagination.
My favourite bit of writing, when the brain takes three ends you didn’t even realise were loose from ages back, ties them together and suddenly presents them to you as the solution to your current problem. And afterwards you can’t quite believe that it wasn’t all planned that way from the start.
I do a lot of walking when I’m writing something, just enough activity to keep forebrain from not getting bored while hindbrain works away in the background. Trains are good, too.
That’s my favorite bit of just about any bit of creative work, too—when I try to decide whether to take credit for my subconscious genius, or admit that my forebrain had no idea how well things would actually turn out before the end…
I’ve been struggling to find this feeling, being in The Dreaded Middle of my current WIP, wherein I fight my subconscious all the way from 25K to 75K.
I keep forgetting that this is process is so much smoother and more cohesive when I’m not demanding logic and straight lines from the giant doodle that is my brain on writing.
This is exactly what I needed to read today. Thank you. 🙂
A lovely post. Beautiful and poetic. And I am glad that someone else besides myself adheres to the afternoon catnap. I always do my very best work after sleeping.
I’ve found that my hindbrain works best on problems while I am playing some inane game on the computer – not some sole playing game, but rather an arcade type game that isn’t too cerebral, but that just lets me float. It is especially important that I NOT care what my score is….
When I am painting, solving a visual puzzle, creating…
I don’t think, I just do.
I call it “thinking sideways.” When I used to have a new museum education program coming up, and now when I have a new class or topic to teach, I think sideways rather than linearly. Rather than obsess on the little amount of time left before the teaching event, what do I have to cover & how, I allow my mind to meander. “Oh, I should make this point” and “that would be fun, especially if I approach it this way,” and “oh, oh, wouldn’t they enjoy learning this concept through doing…” Then, a bit before I “teach” (ok, often the morning of the event or just a few hours before), I throw down what’s been rolling around my thoughts and it pretty much effortlessly turns into a decent outline of the class. My mind has been mulling the needed components over but without the stress of trying to “get it right” from the start. Actually, once I write down the outline, I rarely need to look at it while teaching, unless I have packed it full of astro-physics facts and formulae which I am still absorbing in the still new to me subject of astronomy (my regular courses are in anthropology, archaeology and related areas).
Actually, when I get the time to catch up on my Scottish historical fantasy writing and contemplate the next scene, I pretty much use the same, sideways thinking technique. As I walk home from my day job or sometimes from my evening classes, I wonder how I should enter the next scene and day dream the story/angles of view to myself. No stress if I don’t come up with anything or if I take a gander at different starting and ending points, there’s no need to commit. When I do put fingers to keyboard the next day or so, I can again pretty effortlessly head into the scene and happenings generally flow from there.
The whole point is that there is no mandate to come up with the one correct answer or organization when thinking sideways: no stress, no right or wrong and no beating yourself up if the correct answer doesn’t come in the correct order at the required time.
I am “walkative”. I can’t help but stroll down hallways, streets, etc, in order to think. When I am thinking, it is very frequently the case that I am walking.
solitary walks, breakfast time (I live on my own), 5 am musings, yes, and afternoon naps – the most productive times for creative planning of any sort. As a child I was “Johnny head in the air” always daydreaming, luckily mostly my mother was very understanding, but schools never were of course.
If I try to write with my conscious brain, all that happens are cardboard characters and clicheed events. This is problematic every time I think I know where the story is going and get impatient to get there; and it’s the main reason I don’t outline.
I’ve long since said that my backbrain is cleverer than me. Something just happened in the WIP, _and I did not see it coming_. Yay. It’s always reassuring to hear that other people work in the same way; and I am grateful that, when I started writing, I had such people around; writers who talked about characters turning up and doing things that suprised the author.
For me, it’s sitting on the deck overlooking the yard and garden, the little fountain trickling in the background. I have sat and written all day. Meals, dogs and husband intervene, but the brain is still processing both in foreground and background. I need the marathon writing to get to certain points, and time to step back from it for a while for the hindbrain to make sense of the puzzle. Resolution occurs to me at odd times.
Every time you retrieve a memory, you rewrite it in the direction of making sense. That’s why eye-witness testimony is so unreliable.
I absolutely agree. I don’t trust eyewitness testimony, whether from strangers, who are easily confused by what they saw—or from persons who know someone involved, who will rewrite it until it makes sense with what they want to believe. If ever asked to convict anybody on that basis, I’d have to say no.
What gets me is when people don’t question historical sources. They’ve usually passed not just through one filter, but several – yet somehow they consist ‘the truth’? You wouldn’t necessarily believe your neighbour when he tells you what he saw yesterday as he came out of the pub, but when something was written down five hundred years ago, it’s unassailable?
I absolutely agree with you. What people ‘saw’ is highly questionable. Estimates of the size of armies are a case in point. Or exactly which side moved first in a feud or a battlefield. Or who did in whom. Or whether a rumored event which makes a really good story actually happened at all. I prefer the question, “Cui bono?” (which,should anyone care to drop that bon mot in conversation, is KU-ee BOH-no…)…ie, “Unto whom goeth the benefit?” Or “Who stands to profit?” I’ve always figured that if the ‘bonum’ lands on somebody’s doorstep, whether guilty or not, he was pretty well on the ‘persons of interest’ short list. It’s the who killed Ari question…it matters equally not only who actually did it but also who wanted to, within the living entity that is Reseune.
My hindbrain really likes showers. I get all kinds of great ideas in the shower, stuff just seems to pour out.
I’m trying to get my hindbrain into gear to write an article for our beekeepers newsletter. An experienced beekeeper’s view on a talk given by Dr. James Tew ot The Ohio State University, one of the foremost authorities in the country on bees. The one thing I can take away from the talk, “Bees hate us.”
Now I’ve just GOT to know why! Aside from the whole stealing the honey thing?
I love this post. It so well collects my thoughts on the hustle and bustle of modern life and the need for the quiet that we find in the wild.
A
I’m a cop in Real life as I call it. I always do a follow up interview about a week later with reports. When people sleep they recompile all the details and remember alot more about the incident, epically if it was a sudden traumatic event.
As a kid I was locked outside to go play. We lived on a 200 acre farm in rural Oklahoma. My mom made sure to give me my shotgun and told the dogs to go with me. I would spend hours wondering around the fields and woods day dreaming lol.
The only problem with my generation is there parents.
For some reason, my best thinking time is late at night. I don’t know why. When everyone’s asleep, I’ll walk out into the back yard and just wander back and forth. Some of my best ideas pop into my head during these moments. I’m not talking about long periods of time in the back yard — just a few moments usually produce the best ideas.
skitterling, that’s exactly why they hate us. We break into their houses, rearrange things, move the frames (which aren’t designed for the bees’ convenience, anyway), accidentally break comb, so there’s honey dripping all over, crush bees when we move things, blow smoke into their faces, then put it all back together in a different order than what they had it.
Dr. Tew is a very entertaining and knowledgeable scientist. The hour he spent with us was one of the most instructive I’ve ever had on beekeeping.
Too bad they can’t have honey bees on Cyteen, maybe the station, but not the planet. Well, they can always import it from Earth, just like coffee.
Oooh, bees loose during a station emergency. That would be exciting. 😆