Reading Deprivation Week resistance

[gement]

For those of you who are familiar with The Artist's Way, I don't have to explain Reading Deprivation Week. For the rest of y'all, the idea is to cut out your biggest mind-blanking-time-frittering-filling-yourself-with-the-unimportant activity for a week to find out what ELSE is going on in your brain. Which is, the author theorizes for the majority of people who read books on increasing one's creativite output, reading.

I have previously given up watching tv or playing computer solitaire games (including all other minigames of the Pop Cap/Big Fish varieties (Hi, tithonium and niac! Hi, spaced!)). I have even given up email and LJ for a week.

So these days I consider it a triumph that I'm checking LJ and email within a week, the only other reading I do is the comics page of the paper while I wait for my toast to pop at work, I'm not addicted to any chat interfaces or online games, I'm having trouble getting around to watching seasons of Doctor Who and Torchwood that were HANDED to me as a gift, and I only play minigames when my internet is down and I'm hoping it will come back up in a minute to check my wiki.

What am I doing? I'm thinking about my book. All the time. I mean all the time. I'm checking for new comments again on my wiki, or re-reading my own work obsessively, or I'm replaying scenes in my head. To the exclusion of doing else with my bus ride time or most of my other down cycles.

This is clearly not the best use of my creative time, as I'm not even making up much new stuff these days. Or months, in fact. I would like to be spending that energy viciously editing, or voraciously reading period source material and books on how to write descriptions that don't suck.

Or possibly doing my laundry. That situation's getting a bit urgent. More on that next post.

So how do I do Reading Deprivation Week when what I'm mindlessly reading is my own creative output and taking the book away doesn't help because I have it memorized?

Comments

[pamc.livejournal.com]

How good is your memorization after a week?

Don't read anything you've written. You don't get to see your daily pages, why anything else in the RDW?

[gement.livejournal.com]

My memorization is quite good, sorry to say. It's a side effect of my writing process, which involves obsessive rereading and doing everything out loud. If it doesn't flow well enough that I falter when I try to repeat it without looking at it, I keep grinding off the rough edges.

But... *horrified shudder* Take a week off from checking to see if anyone's looked at my work? Dear lord. I'm not sure I can take it.

Kill or cure, I suppose.

I'm still concerned that I'll retreat into my script-repeating shell instead of doing anything useful with the desperately frustrated energy. Or that I'll lose momentum on the project. Or that all my readers will be sad because I haven't gone and responded to their comments right away...

Hi, there, rationalization brain! Thanks, Pam. That tells me something else I have to cut out, at least. Still not sure what to do with the memorized bits, but it's a start.

[pamc.livejournal.com]

I was being rhetorical with the memory question anyway!

desperately frustrated energy

That's the point... to see what happens with that enery without the normal outlets. Color, paint, walk around, see a movie....

Just don't read. ;)

[gement.livejournal.com]

That's the point... Yes, I know. But I have, when my computer was unavailable, happily spent a week just humming the stories to myself in my head. I got a little itchy, mentally speaking, but not actually productive. I'm not sure how to set down the perfectly-memorized book, and I'm not sure if setting down the wiki will be enough.

[gement.livejournal.com]

I think there's a useful level, where I'm still finding new insights, and an unuseful level, where I'm playing a movie for the thousandth time because it's more comfortable than thinking about doing my laundry.

Right now I find humming my own work to myself more interesting than reading the real live books that will help me improve that work, when I have run out of internal facts and editing tools to improve it more on my own. It's feeling avoidy and futile. I have a stack of very interesting library books about Regency vice that I'm just not quite enthused about looking in, and that tells me my energy and focus are somewhere else. And I can tell you where: any time I have sixty seconds to myself, my brain cocoons itself into nice comfy dialogue again.

[maribou]

You could try aversion therapy. Find something unpleasant, like say, soapy-tasting, and every time you think of your book, you have to taste that thing.

Of course, that's liable to backfire and leave you with an undue love for Thrills gum or something...

[grum]

What about asking the stories to help you write their siblings? That you'll write one if they'll wander off for a bit and let you read the background stuff you need to write them well.
Would it help to set a (fairly rigid) time in which to read comments and write responses to them? Does the kibitzing with your readers actually help with the story? (it seems to from my end, but it's poking at with a long stick (just in case there's an anthill under it)

[gement.livejournal.com]

Kibitzing does help, quite a lot. I have trouble setting rigid limits on my computer time of any sort, and worse with my writing, but I keep trying to figure out if there's a way to do it that will stick for me.

Asking the stories to help me write their siblings fits into my mental framework beautifully. I no longer have the mental relationship with Aldo that lets me tell him, "Please don't let me talk to you or Gerard until 5 pm," and have it stick, but that kind of personification works well for me. Thanks!