Silence

I’ve heard writers talk about going off-line for a while to work on a book, but I’d never done it myself. For years, social media has been a kind of on-line café experience for me. I’d write a page, then go to twitter as a reward, back and forth for 4-5 hours a day. I have found this to be an extremely productive process, and I’ve met a lot of people on-line that I’ve built relationships with.

This weekend, I spent a full day off-line, not because I planned to, but because I was at a Ragnar race in Zion, Utah, where there was virtually no coverage. I was annoyed for most of the time, because I was used to just switching to my phone when I was bored. It was quick, easy stimulation for my brain. Instead, now I had to just sit with silence or make conversation. My brain tends to spin if I don’t force it to think in a particular way, so it did a lot of spinning.

At the end of the weekend, I found myself brimming with story ideas, solutions to a lot of the problems I’d been working on for my current WIP. I knew exactly what needed to happen next, and was excited to get back to work on Monday. So, maybe it wasn’t related to the time I took off of social media. This is definitely not a double-blind experimental study. But I will probably try it again if I get stuck on a project.

The experience has made me wonder how often writer’s block is caused not by a lack of ideas, but too many ideas by too many voices. It has made me think about what it means to find your voice. I have always believed that when I write, I am synthesizing a lot of ideas that I’ve inputted at other times in my life. But what if other people are doing that for me?

I am someone who tends to put in earplugs a lot. I get overstimulated easily by noise, and I am aware of that. Why didn’t it occur to me that I could become overstimulated by psychic noise on the internet, as well?

Sure, there may be an element of nature inspiring me here, but I think it’s more that when I am forced to experience real silence, I become more creative to fill it in my own way. Silence is important to creativity, it turns out.