Eccentric Flower:201004/Disabling Ritual
From Eccentric Flower
Disabling Ritual
Jessie doesn't read here, so she won't mind if I recycle.
I told her:
I learned three, and only three, important things about writing (or programming or drawing or any process of creation) from books. That's about right for lifetime quota on the stopped-clock principle.
The first two, about the writer-hand vs the editor-hand, and about someone giving you permission, are from the flake Natalie Goldberg (speaking of the stopped-clock rule). I discussed them here, over ten years ago (good god).
The third thing is about establishing a ritual, and strangely, I got it from a book about art, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The idea is that you have to find a way to disable the part of your brain that wants to dissect and correct and take apart and analyze. That author calls it the left brain, Goldberg calls it the editor hand, but the point is the same: Anything that you can use to habitually disable that way of thinking, be it a bubble bath or drawing upside down, is a good and vital thing and should be treasured, because not everyone can do it reliably. I can do it with writing, but I can't do it reliably with programming, which is why it's so hard for me to get in the code state of mind. I can do it with art using the tricks in that book, but you know, it's hard to turn your subject matter upside down when you're drawing from life.
Right now I'm supposed to be working on a chunk of code which is a solved problem, and yet isn't. It's a solved problem in that I know the bones of what I have to do, and they are simple. I have to query various databases, and generate XML output. I looked into five different XML generation libraries before I realized that all of them were overkill and it was simpler and more readable just to print lines of XML to a file.
Although I know what I have to do, work is very slow. The problem isn't all these little finicky negotiations of data ("Hmm, what did they intend this field to be used for? Should I put this column in it, or that one? I'd better ask the Registrar what he intends this column to mean. I wonder if their reader has a length limit on that field. I wonder how they feel about odd characters in that attribute. I'd better ask") although those certainly don't make it go any faster. The problem is that I simply can't reliably put myself in "code brain," and never have been able to.
With writing, this is seldom a problem. I can almost always put myself in "writer brain" on demand. I learned that trick years ago. In fact, the problem is usually getting writer brain to shut up. Writer brain has no market and has no ideas. Writer brain keeps me awake at night. Writer brain would get a lobotomy with a metal spike, if I didn't think it would irreparably alter my sparkling personality [1].
Lately I have been having trouble with art brain. Art brain usually gets shouted down so fast she doesn't have time to cause any disruption. But she's been getting belligerent. Art brain gave me some trouble the other night (no, not Monday night when I unexpectedly got almost no sleep; I have no idea what went haywire then), because she insisted on trying to make a mental layout for drawing one of my short stories as a comic-book-style narrative. She has decided which story should be adapted first ("Codependence," because it is short and contains no challenging-to-visually-depict passages) and has even begun doing the framework. The problem is, as I keep trying to tell her, I cannot draw.
I suspect art brain is one of the factors behind my flirtation with a tablet computer. (See, the problem with drawing devices is that they don't work the way I think about drawing. I want to be able to draw on the screen - or, put differently, I need to be able to see the state-of-the-drawing-so-far on the surface beneath my pencil. My brain cannot handle the idea of making the physical movements of drawing in one place and seeing the results in a different place. This is because, while I am hardly a novice at the idea of manipulating computer constructs with pointing devices, the part of me that wields a pen or pencil is wired from a different place, a place of physical reflex. But I digress.)
If art brain wants a tablet computer, she needs to convince me she will actually use it more than one night a month, just as maker brain bought all sorts of electronics stuff which is currently gathering dust and a digital camera I barely use, and so forth and so on. Meanwhile, gamer brain can have all the money she wants, because gamer brain actually uses her toys, seven nights a week unless physically prohibited from doing so. Unfortunately, gamer brain is currently in cahoots with art brain because she's tired of sitting upstairs all the time. If there's a tablet that has both minimally acceptable drawing ability and minimally acceptable gaming ability, I suspect I am about to be out some cash.
Which I can afford. But if that tablet computer gathers dust, I swear, I'm getting out the tamping iron.
As you know, Bob, I cannot stand Natalie Goldberg's work, and that's because my analytical brain doesn't really stand in the way of my writing ability. Sure, it does at first as I sort out character motivations and plot, but once that's set in my head, I can write -- and edit myself -- as I go.
Freewriting, on the other hand, inevitably results in a pile of bullshit I would never consider posting anywhere. Maybe I'm unusual this way, but I'd rather spend an hour working on the 250 correct words than spend the same amount of time writing "Sweet sparkly Tinkerbell Jesus, freewriting is a waste of my time" over and over in the hopes that I'll eventually get a useful idea.
-- 21:18, 28 April 2010 (BST)
Joy:
Nonelvis, you are my people.
(Although I do a kind of freewrite at the beginning, but it is still not really freewriting because I'm writing down all of my ideas/snippets/pieces of my argument, so that then I can rearrange them and feel secure that all the ideas I've had so far are in my document for the finding/searching, but then when I really start writing the words have to be perfect before moving on. Well, about 17 so-called drafts worth of perfect for one sentence or paragraph before moving on to the next.)
-- 21:49, 28 April 2010 (BST)
Iain:
Writer brain has no market and has no ideas. Writer brain keeps me awake at night. Writer brain would get a lobotomy with a metal spike, if I didn't think it would irreparably alter my sparkling personality [1].
I point out that this, combined with other things you've said in the past, would indicate not that writer brain doesn't have ideas, but that it has ideas which you do not wish to write down and/or see if there is a market for them. Which is a quite different thing.
She has decided which story should be adapted first ("Codependence," because it is short and contains no challenging-to-visually-depict passages) and has even begun doing the framework. The problem is, as I keep trying to tell her, I cannot draw.
This, I point out, has not stopped a certain number of people from doing it anyway, and becoming oddly successful. And you could scarcely be less talented than them. Besides, draughtmanship is, so I'm told, one of those things you can actually become better at with practice. (I note the artist of "A Girl and her Fed" as a case in point; she's become so much better over time that it's hard to believe that the artist now and the artist then are the same physical person: old stuff versus new stuff)
If art brain wants a tablet computer, she needs to convince me she will actually use it more than one night a month
Go, art brain, go! go go go! Rah rah sis boom bah! Gooooooooooo Art Brain! (You will have to imagine someone who is not me doing a few dozen split jumps and wearing the short skirt and waving the ponpoms, as I would never! No, really, not even for this!)
-- 22:06, 28 April 2010 (BST)
You know about Comic Life, right? (http://plasq.com/comiclife-win) Making comics is a lot simpler than it used to be, that program removes a lot of the drudgework. (Ruling panel borders and all that.) You can develop a crude but charming art style, you can do cool stuff with photo-comics, you can learn to do stuff with 3D CGI programs... Really, if you have the inspiration and the time to create comics, quit stifling yourself and just have at it. It'll be fun, and I suspect you'll do something people want to see.
-- 01:06, 29 April 2010 (BST)
I have editor brain, which works for any type of writing, but several flavors of writer brain, some of which are easier to summon than others. Tech-writer brain in particular has a tendency to hide at times, usually behind another kind of writer brain that would prefer the center stage. I realize this has nothing to do with talent or ability and everything to do with the fact that I'd much rather be writing about movies or something personal than explaining how to do XYZ Procedure.
Freewriting, or morning pages, or whatever, doesn't do jack for my writing. I found it very useful to do the morning-page thing shortly after I woke up, because it would sometimes be a good way to fish up problems that were bugging me that I didn't want to deal with, but that was more personal and less writerly. A nice exercise if I would get up earlier and do it, but I'm lazy and enjoy sleeping more instead.
I love art brain but I don't have art skills to go with it -- I couldn't even draw decent stick figures for a t-shirt I wanted to design for Chip at one time.
Reading about Phineas Gage and some of your stories about different parts of the brain reminds me of this excellent documentary I saw at SXSW this year, my favorite movie of the year so far, called "Marwencol." If you get a chance to see it, go. It is about a gentleman who was attacked in a bar and suffered a brain injury, couldn't afford proper physical/mental therapy, and to help himself, started creating this fictional town in his backyard and populating it with characters who are based on his real-life acquaintances. One interesting part is finding out how different a person he is from his self before the attack. Fascinating, a bit sad at times, and I hope it gets out there so you all can give it a look.
-- 16:36, 29 April 2010 (BST)
I don't write fiction, but when I'm writing a brief, I do find myself getting into the Zone, as it were. It's certainly not freewriting, but it's still a kind of weird autopilot, to the point where I find it hard to have conversations with other people while I'm doing it. When I'm done, I have no idea if what I've written is good or is crap, and I need to put it down for 24 hours before I can evaluate it and figure out how to polish it. (It's usually surprisingly good and just needs s tweaks, additions, subtractions or rearrangements in a couple of places.)
I took a life drawing class in undergrad (pass/fail, of course). Two interesting things emanated from it. One was an exercise the instructor gave us to draw with our off hand (the left, in my case). It was freeing in that I wasn't really trying they way I would with my right hand -- it was just going with the flow (I guess you'd say Editor Brain was disabled at that point). It wasn't any better than what I did with my right hand, but it was surprisingly not much worse. But it was the process that was interesting.
The other thing was that while I was drawing, I was looking at lines and shadows. It wasn't until the end of class that I looked up and thought, "Whoa, that model has a great body."
-- 17:24, 29 April 2010 (BST)
Andy:
Have you figured out how to explain the "I can't reliably put myself in 'code brain'" thing to a manager? I spend less than half my time in "code brain", but produce code three times as fast as most people when I'm there, so in the long run it works out fine. And the code I produce is *good* code; free of subtle bugs (the straightforward bugs like syntax errors are gone long before anyone else sees the code, and easy to read, understand, and modify. If I force myself to write code when my brain is not in "code brain" state, it's buggy crap. So my progress is quite uneven when viewed on a short timescale, and it's hard to get a manager to take a longer-term perspective.
-- 19:27, 29 April 2010 (BST)
Andy: It doesn't really come up because I don't work in commercial software any more (partly for that reason). I don't need to be in code-brain for a lot of what I do daily - the firefighting, the maintenance tasks - and on big projects where I do need to be in that state, the boss is tolerant, because maintenance is always a higher priority here than major new work. Which is how I like it.
(That said, I'm rapidly coming to a point with a current project where I'm going to have to sequester for a day or two to get it finished without distractions. He's pretty tolerant of that too.)
Iain: I ordered a tablet laptop today. I will expect photos of you in the cheerleader outfit at your earliest convenience. Thx.
-- 20:54, 29 April 2010 (BST)
Mmancuso:
An unused dust-gathering art tablet could be leased to undeserving parties for pittance....
-- 20:33, 28 April 2010 (BST)