11 Oct 2009

A Sunday at the Keyboard

Posted by annmcolford

It’s Sunday morning (an unseasonably frigid Sunday morning, besides), and I’m sitting here in my sunny and warm living room with the cat snoozing nearby and a cup of coffee close at hand. I somehow dawdled enough again this morning to miss church, and I didn’t even go late for the “Eucharist of the coffee and the donuts,” as has been my habit of late. Or my late habit, if you will. One of these days I will feel compelled to go back again on a more regular basis. Or not. But for now I am reveling in the freedom of not having to be anywhere in particular on a lovely but cold October morning.

My earlier dawdling is one illustration of how strong my urge for procrastination is. Another is my detour just now to check out my Facebook page. (I posted a link this morning to a short New York Times article about NYC’s recent ban on school bake sales, and artists’ responses, and I absolutely HAD to go see if anyone had commented; I then spent 20 minutes responding to a handful of friend requests and updating my profile information.) Before that, I watered the plants, turned on the Weather Channel to get an update on the current conditions (36 degrees at 11 am), even though I could just as easily look out the window or open the door, and checked the cell phone for messages. (There were none.)

I’m not sure why I’m procrastinating this morning—I mean, writing is an enjoyable activity for me, most of the time, and I did feel a pull toward the keyboard earlier this morning. So why the delaying tactics?

Maybe it’s all part of the creative process. Maybe I’m not really procrastinating—maybe I’m actually distracting the critical, left-brained internal editor so that the playful, uninhibited right-brained writer can process a few ideas uninterrupted in the background. All good writing goes through the “staring out the window” phase, and maybe that’s what my puttering is all about.

Or maybe I’m full of shit.

Actually, I think—today, anyway—my delaying tactics are motivated by fear: fear that really don’t have anything interesting to say; fear that it’s all navel-gazing; fear that I won’t be able to take these potentially fascinating thoughts swirling in my brain and transform them into words and coherent sentences.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Lynn posted this quote on my Facebook Wall: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” (The quote is attributed to sportswriter Walter “Red” Smith.) Despite the obvious advances in technology, the process remains the same. I have all these great ideas and leaps of profundity while I’m cooking or eating or washing dishes or driving or walking or doing anything that keeps my body focused on a mundane task, allowing my mind to wander. (And God only knows where it goes to when left on its own.) But when I sit at the keyboard, all those ideas scurry away to the dark corners and hide, like tiny, scared, shy kittens.

And within that metaphor lies the answer, I think. To coax kittens (or small children) out of hiding, it’s not enough to present them with the logic of how safe the room really is. The fearful mind is not swayed by logic. What often works best is to simply ignore the hidden one and go on with the usual routine. Just let the common sounds of everyday living—no sudden, startling movements or big, loud noises—do the convincing.

So that means I’m comparing my creative process to a scared cat. Great.

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