Thursday, 7 February 2013

Hitting capacity


I was reading a post by agent Rachelle Gardner the other day about guarding your creativity and how excessive blog-hopping can be detrimental to being able to focus on your own creative projects. (I say this, linking you over to that blog. Damn those links! So sneaky...) I have to agree. With each new technology there seems to be more and more fragmentation of our attention. It used to be that a cracking book could consume me and cloud my ability to write, but now there are all these other things that can take my time and fill my head. Twitter is addictive, the blog-hopping so difficult to resist and facebook would slay me. Don't get me wrong, some can be extremely inspiring or randomly give me the plot clue or blogging idea I have been looking for, but it is still constantly more for my head to contend with. How are the fledgling ideas supposed to have a chance to be heard, let alone mull and grow?

As Gardner concludes, we need to find a balance. How true.  I'm fairly sure I hit my brain capacity a while ago, especially after I had the kids. In this light I find I relate to Homer Simpson, with his "one thing in, one thing out" policy. I only hope that it isn't an important thing that drops as I allow something random in, but you never can tell, can you?  In addition, all of that is just the friction of social media versus creativity. Bung in those unexpected real-life issues and something has to give somewhere. I’m in that triple mix at the moment and if I can just stay mindful of it, I'll fight to make it the social media that suffers and not the writing.

 So tell me, how do you set your balance and what are the things that you safeguard?
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous10 February 2013 at 11:26

    Hi Pernille

    As you may have spotted, for the month of February, I'm taking a Sabbatical from Twitter. I'm determined to break the back of this rewrite & didn't need the distraction. And just by deleting it from my favourites it's been easy to put out of my mind.

    I agree 100% with the idea that too much bloggery can kill creativity. Where most people's writing blogs are concerned - I'm rarely tempted. There's too much repetition for one thing. Either that or they are written by people with dubious credentials. The few I do enjoy, I leave to one side for times when I can enjoy reading them without feeling guilty.

    I allow half an hour or thereabouts each day for my Live Journal - which is less a blog & more a sort of 'daily pages' to get my writing muscles flexed.

    My writing time is 90% sacrosanct. 9.30-ish until around one o'clock six days a week. I leave space for a social life & the unexpected! By & large though - I try & put in the hours.



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  2. Pernille Hughes11 February 2013 at 12:03

    Great discipline, Carole. And sometimes all it takes is the decision to do it. It can all soon become routine. This month I've had to draw up a plan of what I need to get done, and everything is much clearer and it doesn't allow much room for random factors to creep in.

    Your deleting things from the favourites bar is an ace idea. Searching will become an effort.

    See you on Twitter in a few weeks then, and I hope the rewriting goes really well.

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