Write Awful

I frustrate myself sometimes. I do things that I know will hinder my ambitions, but I can't help myself. When I am trying to be productive in my writing, what I ought to do is to operate in silence- to not take in any stimuli. Some of that is necessary, but I really should shut down the input when it's time for output. I just have a hell of a time for that, but I'm still relatively young. It's quite possible that I'll get there someday.

It's really not so bad when I have music on. I can manage to not get caught up in the lyrics of a song, and the music can influence my mood in helpful ways. If I'm really feeling the impact of an uptempo song, that seems to put me in the right frame of mind to get some things done. I'm singing along, I'm slapping the surface of my desk in time with the music, I'm walking around with a sort of musical step, and I'm writing when things come to me.


When I have on a movie or television show, it doesn't quite work out that way. I get all hung up on the plot of the movie, and my mind remains too engaged in it to ever conceive of an idea that I can write up. It's happened that I wrote something during the course of a movie or whichever, but I feel sure that it was in spite of it and not because of it. The movie just keeps too tight a grip on my thoughts while shaping my mood.

Knowing this, I should never put on a movie unless I intend to keep the sound off, and then what's the point of that? Is the movie on so that I can occasionally glance at it and waste a minute or two working out what's going in in the movie at that point? I really hate myself for every unproductive moment that comes this way. I only wish that I were truly at ease with my thoughts and feelings, and didn't have to stave them off with one stimulus or another.