On effects of extended continuous concentration, alternate perspectives, and practice of flow

11/06/2010 10:14 am

At least she was starting early for this morning's writing session. She'd also scribbled some notes and reminders of thoughts that had been running through her mind earlier. That however seemed to mean that she was not forced to do the continuous writing thing. She was now working in a manner more like she was used to. It had begun to seem that the true value of this challenge was the practice of it and how it could either affect her thinking, her awareness/consciousness, that it would have an effect on her mind to work in this manner. That the whole practice had nothing to do with actually writing a novel, but could possible instead be a form of meditation or even a form of excercising one's creativity. It was more than that - it was the practice of fluency. What it was like to work to express continously for that period of time. What were the effects of doing that on a daily basis over time? She was having plenty of trouble trying to type no matter whether she wanted to stop to think or not. No, she was not fulfilling that rule. How could she do that. She could not stand the idea of not fixing stuff as she went along. She wanted that product in her hand when she'd done her writing stint for the day....

She remembered how a drawing teacher in college had the students drawing an elaborate arrangement of jumbled chairs and desks. The students slaved away at capturing the proper angles and spaces. Then the teacher began to cover up the set-up with drop cloths and drapes. The students had to continue drawing the set-up only now they had to erase what they'd worked so hard to draw. They were to learn that there work just was not that precious and one had to be able to let go of it, again and again.

What could she use as a filler or holding place marker whenever she came to a typing stall? They never lasted that long but still. Having a typing marker would be a kind of cheat because it would mess up the word count. Well one could always go in before with a word find to delete the place holders. Was her writing was getting more time specific by discussing such matters as place holders, finding them, and deleting them? So far it did not look like she would be giving up this habit, this need to pause, this need to self correct.

Why could she do it in drawing? Why was that not a problem? She just loved to have that drawing implement move across the surface letting out its marks and flow of pigments. Was there a way to have writing be like that? Was that what the speech therapist in "The King's Speech" was using for his exercises? So how did one reconcile this practice with the practice of putting down a required amount of words that were supposedly to form a single entity?

The night before she'd read up a bit on the process and the different points of view that were out there. There was a faction of so-called 'rebels' who held that it was ok to use the Nano challenge to work on whatever one wanted to work on. It need not be a novel one was writing. There was a bit of discussion over the question. That had been what she'd wished to begin with. But her assumption that she had to do this by the basic rules was holding sway for her. Silly it seemed that if she could find a way to write what she normally would anyway, but using this more intense focus of continuous writing sessions, and somehow put this into a fictional structure, it was ok to participate. She would have met the rules and qualifications.

Already the previous night she had considered that she could not post that day's writing to the blog she'd started for this. She felt there was too much in there that was revealing more than she cared to reveal. This was not issues she was sensitive about, just issues she felt others would not understand and she was not ready to make these views overly public. This morning she'd decided she would go ahead and post the session, still only the third day's session. No one knew yet of the existence of this blog, so there was not too much risk that people around her would find it. By that time, the post would be buried. She tried to post the session but there had been no mechanism by which to publish. She would have to decide all over again later whether or not to publish it. By then she would have another session's writing done as well.

It seemed to be going so slowly. Yes, she'd started earlier this day. This was only the 4th day. It seemed to her as if she'd been writing for ages. It seemed to her as if no sooner had she finished one session than it was time to do another. This was just too intense, too consuming. Was it obsessive too, or could it turn into obsession just because one was creating a new habit by doing this as a practice?

10:45am

She had not even begun to write about anything on the list she'd scribbled. This gave pause. Did she want to refer to the list? There was pleasure in not having to do that. Pleasure in having to rely on whatever came up, even when there was nothing coming up. Oh this torture of writing this way. Did it ever get any better?

Every once in a while she would try to do what those rappers did - they seemed to be able to speak in rhythm and rhyme on the spot. The rhythm one could do. One could hear the format of rap rhythm in one's head and just follow that beat, but to come up with coherent phrases, lines, sentences that rhymed, on the spot - how did they do that? Had they developed a huge memory bank of rhyming words? Did they practice rattling them off? Long ago she'd had a suspicion that this was how Shakespeare had been able to write his plays. She had noticed from the experience of having to read Shakespeare and having to cram it for a test, that extended intense sessions of reading Shakespeare, had after effects in one's mind. Afterwards one kept hearing the language. It just made itself up as a kind of backdrop.

The same thing had happened whenever she got down to focused work on several of her school subjects, physical activities even. After a long session ice skating she would still be ice skating in her head through the rest of the day. Work on french practices and she would start to think in French. Work on typing and she would start to see her thoughts unroll letter by letter on an imaginary page. The best was with drawing painting sessions - she thought it was those that involved a lot of pattern making. Coming out into the world everything looked different. One could suddenly see patterns everywhere one looked instead of just seeing the objects. The world took on a heightened beauty. That effect wore off during the course of the day. One's perceptions returned to normal.

11:01 am

What could she remember from her list? At least she could try to write a remembered version of her list of things to maybe write about. But doing this would require too much stopping to think.

Reading French, or any foreign language, she could never stand to stop to look things up. She preferred to read as quickly as she could whether she understood it or not. This way she could hear the language in the imagined sounds of a native speaker. Some meanings would come across, some would not. She relied on the ability to guess or assume what might be being talked about. There were books in her own language that had plenty of words she did not know - they were of other time periods - like Shakespeare, and the series of seafaring novels. In the seafaring series, she had gotten halfway through the 17 books before she figured out what a frequently mentioned object was - the 'belay pin'. Now it again meant nothing to her.

11:09a

Yes she could always write down the time if she got stuck. She might find herself writing nothing but the time. She would have to set her clock to show the seconds. It had been the changing of the clocks the previous night. She had no clock that needed manual setting. She wondered how she would know if her machines had actually gone through with the process properly. The morning radio program would validate that everything was in order. It was also a morning that she woke early in, and rose early, after which she found herself feeling tired. It was not the sleepy tired but the tired of rising on less sleep than one was used to. That tiredness had faded with the preparation of breakfast and the turning to writing so much earlier than she previously had.

She had felt sure she would not continue with this writing experiment. So sure it was a waste of time and a ridiculous effort for her. She was not someone who needed to write a novel. It was not a dream of hers. But this was becoming a fascination of some sort. Why was she indulging in this? Because she was finding that in a certain way she could do it? Here would start the endless internal arguments of why to continue or not continue something.

One did not have enough time to be putting one's energy into this process. But was this really about creating that overall massive quantity for her or was it about how the doing of it affected her?

She had been distressed and somewhat depressed the previous day over the obligations she had hanging over her head that people were waiting for her delivery on. Projects she had agreed to by word or by implication. Projects she had not been able to say 'no' on, because she could not bring herself to refuse. The interim solution she had come up with was that she simply had to take at least some small daily regular action toward the personal projects she most dreamed of working on. She had been doing that already with a small series of figure and dancer invention sketches. This was to be an action she could perform in small daily ways until she was set up to work in the larger format she really had wanted to work in. There had been lapses in this practice though. Lately she had been more consistently doing this on a daily basis. This was such a small investment of time. It took perhaps 15 minutes to do one of these little inventions. The more time consuming part was that she wanted to be able to use this as a daily art work to share in cyberspace. This meant either photographing properly and
*11:28a.///// going through all the processes of optimizing the image and getting it put online, or taking a lower quality photo with the camera phone, sending that to her webmail account and from their forwarding it to where others could see it. She did not have the most up-to-date technological means readily available that would make these acts a simple matter. Even then, these technologies had their times when they just did not work, or rather, the systems were down and things did not work.

The idea had come to her that if she could find a way to see these obligatory tasks as doors to her own intentions and purposes, she might be able to be more accepting and glad of them. But that gave way to the fear that would that then mean she was giving up on what she'd always thought she'd wanted and completely accepting this other path. Yes that could be part of what the dilemma of this was for her.

11:38a 2052 words 11022 characters 158 lines hah! - no stopping to count words this time!
10:14 - 11:38 am = 84 min? much faster today. Hmmm