motivation
by phill
Alright, so I haven’t written anything in a creative, writer-me sense for quite a while. This isn’t a particularly new thing, if you were to plot my productivity against time, it’d probably look a little bit like this:
In other words, ostensibly utterly random, but containing a complex and incalculable correlation involving variables such as the arrival of newly acquired games, how much exercise I’ve done lately, the whimsicality of my thoughts during the preceeding weeks, average hours of sleep, influence of books read, number of minutes spent totally unaware of the fact that I’m driving my car and that I may in fact crash at any second while daydreaming, Inspiration Factor, Irritation Factor, number of neurons fired divided by three point one four one five, the list goes on (and on, and on). Fact is, I don’t really have any control over when I’m going to be productively creative, and that can be somewhat frustrating at times. Worse still is that generally when I do have an idea, it’s at the worst possible time for the expression of that idea. I have a report due, or I have no writing implement on me, or I’m trying to fight off the Beaver King and save Damville. Worse even still is the fact that once I have these ideas, I realise just how little time I have to figure out the best way to represent them in literature form (and the term ‘literature’ is applied very, very loosely here).
So, here’s me writing for me, trying to rationalise out answers to these annoying inactions. As far as I can see, I have a few problems that can be easily put into question form: what can I use to reliably store ideas that I might have at every single hour of the day, how do I know which ideas are the best in order to use my limited time to express them, and how can I stop myself just falling into a total apathy about writing and letting the hobby fall into the refuse.
Question 1) What can I use to reliably store ideas that I might have at any hour of the day?
This one’s probably not so hard, seeming as though my lifestyle means that I’m either at a computer desk, asleep in bed, or driving between the two somewhere. The records of my ideas usually don’t need to be large–some of my best ideas have been a word or two strung together on a piece of scrap paper, or a line in a .txt on my desktop. But putting them into some logical order seems to be a good idea to me right now. For this task I’m going to choose good old Google Docs and their associated Google Notebook feature. I was tempted to start up another twitter account that I could use to record ideas, which I could then open up to other people, but the format isn’t particularly useful, and one day I might have something that does require more than 140 characters to stoichiometrically express. With Google Notebook, I have a little button in my Firefox browser that opens up a virtual .txt that I can then type into and store for some other day, while in Google Docs (and it’s new offline suite) I have all the formatting features I could want, and a way of sharing documents quickly and easily with peers.
For the times when I don’t have a screen in front of me, I’m going to grab a really tiny notebook that I can fit in any pocket and carry that around with me so I can record anything that comes to mind. It’s old-school, but ink on paper is how this whole mess got started, so who am I to refute its effectiveness?
Question 2) How can I rank my ideas so that I can use my time effectively to tackle the better ones?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this really is a dumb question. Really dumb. Young Hilton dumb. There’s no real way to ‘rank’ ideas–this isn’t the races and there’s no odds-on favourite for winning the 2 A.M. Eureka Cup. However, that doesn’t change the extremely limited amount of time I have to work through them all. Thinking about it, I guess the only thing I can really do is assume I’m going to have enough time to get through all of them at some point in the future, and just keep going through them one at a time. There’ll always be a backlog, but discounting any idea is a very wasteful thing to do.
Question 3) How can I stop myself just falling into a total apathy about writing and letting the hobby fall into the refuse?
Willpower, you gutless wonder. It’s not like a goddamn diet, you actually do enjoy doing this writing shindig, so there shouldn’t be any reason why you can’t find the time to enjoy it on a regular basis. Got it? Good.
Right, well, I feel better. Renewed enthusiasm and all that jazz. Sidenotes: A Clockwork Orange is fantastic, the new Raconteurs/Saboteurs album, Consolers of the Lonely is amazing, NIN’s Ghosts I-IV is the perfect music for study, and I haven’t slept properly in a week.
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Comments
Oo, Clockwork Orange! I love that book. I’m trying to get the movie (it is strangely elusive), even though it’s not supposed to be any good — compared to the book, anyway.
As for ranking ideas, you’re silly. : P
Heh, yeah it’s a fantastic book! Haven’t seen the movie myself, but I can now that I’ve read the book (I hate doing it the other way around).
And as for motivation, I went ahead and wooshed out a 1,700 word story last night in about 10 minutes while watching the Bangalore IPL match, so I guess that goes to show that my productivity is totally unpredictable.
Is the IPL catching on in Australia? People are crazy about it here. Even I’ve managed to catch a few matches, though it’s a shame Bangalore’s not doing very well.
Yeah it’s catching on a bit. They tend to show it quite late at night, but sometimes push it forward. I think the main attraction is the fact that there’s this smattering of Aussies in there, as well as the fact that it’s 20/20 cricket, which is a lot more exciting than the traditional match. It’s good to fall asleep to d: