More crises - none of which have been of my making - on current project. 7 weeks till shoot, during which I have to move house. Big decision to be made. I'll keep you posted.
Fantastically, it turns out there are such things as theta waves. I had no idea. It is faintly disappointing that they aren't used by the inhabitants of Mars to control our puny human minds and dictate our puny human destinies, but nonetheless it's an interesting article.
It precisely describes a mental state that I recognise and have talked about many times as being my most creative, that strange sort of mental suspension when you aren't consciously thinking about anything, but ideas just come. It's a step removed from daydreaming, which is a more active state, and often happens to me on train or bus journeys. I think it has something to do with the motion, the repetitive noise, the fact that the world passes you without demanding your attention, and that you have no responsibility at all other than to sit there. You kind of disengage from the world around you, and the next thing you know - POP! An idea bursts in your head as if from nowhere.
The real hook of the article is that by using a method called 'neurofeedback' you can train yourself to enter that state, or to increase the power of that state when you do.
I am by nature sceptical, and the fact that nutcase Scientologists bang on about "rehabilating the thetan" (presumably akin to one of those dastardly all-powerful Martians mentioned above) almost made me skip the article, but I read it with a real jolt of recognition.
How about you? Have you/do you enter that state? Is that one of the reasons why writers are supposed drink on the job, to artificially simulate that oxymoronic sense of active disengagement?
Hmm.
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For some unknown reason listening to Oasis does it for me. If I'm staring at a blank page and unsure which direction a script or scene should go, I slap on the Gallagher brothers and within minutes my mind empties and ideas come flooding in.
And yes, beer does help too. However, I prefer not to drink and write because I fear being arrested for being drunk in charge of a keyboard would be terribley embarrassing. You don't want to have to tell people you've been banned from operating a keyboard for tweleve months. You might have to go and work in McDonalds until your ban is over.
I am entirely thetanic. If there is such a word.
I try not to think about work at all and do something else entirely. Sport, music, TV, reading, the beach, whatever. And then I'll find when I sit down to summon up the energy to 'create', there's stuff there waiting to come out.
Their Thetanic Majesties request...
Cannae do the drink/work cliche. Of course I tried it, just because I wanted to be a REAL writer and that's apparently what REAL writers do, but instead of inspiration all it gave me was a headache and the disappointing realisation I would never be Hemingway.
No surprise there, then.
Hemingway rarely drank and wrote. He set himself a target of X words a day. If he was going fishing, hunting or on the piss the next day he wrote 2X the day before.
You're still in with a chance! lol
I know exactly how to turn on the thetan: go out somewhere without a notebook.
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