The medium inspires the message, weirdly.

[elfs]

The other day I was blocked on a story. The blockage was very simple: where did these characters come from? What's their justification for being in the position they're in? Emma & Jacie didn't seem to be in an abusive relationship, and was starting to wonder, what's the leverage here that makes it possible for Emma to exploit Jacie, and so on?

I do most of this kind of thinking in one of two places: either while I'm walking through the woods, in which case I'm just thinking, often out loud, to empty air, or while I'm sitting at the keyboard, waiting for the story to start coming to me. Sometimes, though, this doesn't work. It wasn't working for Jacie and Emma.

This afternoon, Omaha and I were at Kouryou-chan's school, cleaning up the yard and doing the basic work around the facility. Rain threatened from the west, and it was cooler than it should have been. My palm pilot was in the charger at home. Every few minutes my hand would habitually head toward my pocket in the hopes of pulling it out and catching up a chapter or two of some book I've been reading (right now, I'm re-reading portions of Egan's Diaspora). But instead of the palm, I had my old Moleskine in there. We were running out of tasks and, desperate for something to do, I wrote down "Jacie comes from..." and immediately ideas started to flow. The whole backstory of their relationship came together in about a minute.

Intrigued by this possibility, I immediately turned to a completely different story, one I don't think I've blog about much, and again much of the backstory came together.

I've experimented with this a little and I think I might be on to something: a change of medium makes for a big unblock. It might as simple as, by being analog, whatever I write is okay to be crap: I can't show it to someone else. By not being on the computer, I'm implying to my subconscious that it doesn't have to be good and correct, not even eventually. It's going to get thrown away.

Edd Vick refers to this process as "driving to the story." Maybe I should try driving to the story with a pen and notebook, and only open up the laptop when I finally get there.

Comments

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

Sometimes low tech is teh best.

- your friendly luddite.

I know this one.

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

Not weird. I became dependent on this method as a journalist. I had to go there, of course, physically, and sometimes I would take a recorder, but never a computer and nothing ever substituted for writing it down with a pen and paper. There is, apparently, belief that typing and staring at the screen is just not as "activating" of our creative centers as the "craftiness" of hand writing.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

I usually sketch things out on paper, especially creative things. Even when I write a program, I'll sometimes sketch out the plans for it on paper, especially algorithms. I'm gradually getting better at tossing away things I write on a computer, but I really need to realize that I can store as many notes as I can write without any storage issues on every computing device I own, from my phone to my file-server.

If only I could tell my subconscious that.