20140111.0900

I have been doing more writing of late, which pleases me greatly; I actually begin to feel productive.  Even if I am not necessarily getting the great, grand publications and advancing my scholarly career as I ought to do, I am pushing more of my text out into the world--and I am even managing somehow to get paid for pieces of it.  Perhaps one with it is my consideration or reconsideration of how I work as a writer, of my preferred writing situation, and as I know well that among the readers of what I post here are writers of much greater skill and aplomb than am I, I offer my report thereof.  Maybe, as with other notes I have made in this webspace, it will open a discussion that I and others can use to improve upon ourselves and upon the world.

Perhaps owing to my family's storied and extensive background in music--my brother holds a degree in music, and he is only the most recent in the family to earn one; too, many of my family across generations have been performing musicians at varying levels of artistic and commercial success--I find that I work best when I am able to have music playing.  I know that there are some who need silence into which to summon their Muses, and I hold no rancor for them, but I know also that my experience calls for Euterpe or Polyhymnia to accompany her sisters, whether Thalia, Calliope, Cleo, Erato, or Melpomene be the one to grace my presence with hers.  (Neither Terpsichore nor Urania often come to visit me.)  This may be somewhat odd given my several past expressions of appreciation for the quiet of the morning and my demonstrated tendency to write in the morning (I think I say it best here).  I will plead only that I do not do all of my writing in the morning.  Not by any means.

Tied almost certainly to my writing in the morning, as well as to my own background and what I must admit as a weakness in my makeup, is my overwhelming preference for cups of coffee while I write.  (I am over the earlier problem, thanks, although I still drink a fair bit of wonderfully astringent Darjeeling.)  People have commented on the near-inevitability of seeing a cup of coffee in my hand or within easy reach when they see me, and they are not far wrong.  I have extolled the virtues of the black brew before; I need not do so again.  It does, however, undergird much of my writing even now.

Something that I have increasingly found I need to have when I write is a means of escape; I have to be able to get up and move about.  For one thing, it reduces the effects of the sciatica with which I have recently been formally diagnosed (as if I need another reason to feel like an old man).  For another, it eases the eye strain to which I feel I have been increasingly prone; I used to be able to stare at a screen for hours on end, but no longer.  For still another, I find that walking around the house a bit helps me to refocus my attention on the writing task that faces me.  Something about the physical motion, the going away and returning, works to my advantage.  Perhaps it is simply that doing so, working the large muscles of my legs, stimulates blood flow from which the brain benefits.  Perhaps it is the eureka phenomenon the Good Doctor identifies at work in a small way.  But whatever it is, it helps.