Confessions of a Creative Slacker
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Home is Where the Distraction Is, or Woolgathering for Creative Types
Distraction in the home is a pernicious problem. Housework can get you when you least expect it -- I put off working on this piece for a full 48 hours by beginning to dust my worktable and ending up completely cleaning out my entire office. Old clothes and shoes to Goodwill, useless magazines to the Half-Price Books, reorganization and rearrangement and re-indexing and... oops. What day is it?
Well, the computer was on while I did it, so that sort of counts. I was thinking about working, I was electronically and psychically connected to the piece while I was standing on my head in the closet. Yeah, that's it. Now I think I've gotten that cleaning bug out of me for the time being, but there is a lot of laundry that hasn't been done yet...
At least with housework you have accomplished something. There is, when you finally come back to the keyboard hours (or days) later, the knowledge that, if nothing else, you weren't goofing off. But when everything is cleaned, tidied, indexed and recycled, the enterprising artist can then find other means of diversion (this can be quite literal; sometimes these things cannot be found until after the housework hurricane hits).
Many people cite the television as the chief home-based cause of artistic inactivity. I have been known to indulge in this form of distraction on more than one occasion -- it's amazing how fascinating McMillan and Wife becomes when you're on a deadline -- but for the true connoisseur of slack, I submit the bookcase. (Most creative people have serious libraries. It's all that time spent in bookstores when one should be writing, or painting, or composing, or whatever it is one should be doing. But more on that later.)
Convenient and educational, bookcases are treasure troves full of little jewels that suck away time from the (unsuspecting?) artist. It's just like that game you used to play when you had to go to the library and look up osmosis in the encyclopedia, and you would flip back and forth to opera, oscilloscopes, ophthalmology and Olivier, Laurence.
Pretend your bookcase is one big encyclopedia (which, of course, it is). Look, why just look at that old dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice, waiting to be reread. And there's a book of quotations. Maybe there's something in there that will spark an idea. Oh yes, there was that niggling little fact about the Battle of Hastings that needs checking ... What year did Beethoven write that quartet?... How did the line in that Rumer Godden novel go...? Soon enough, several minutes or even hours can be whiled away surfing the net of one's own mind, bouncing from thought to half-formed thought and storing it all into the Artistic Consciousness.
It's research. I needed to take a break. I needed inspiration. You get the idea.
(Speaking of surfing, I must admit that, now that I have this truly juicy multimedia oracle just sitting right here in my house waiting to do my bidding -- no waiting lists, no pesky lab proctors to throw me out at midnight -- and the speedy connection all hooked up and ready to go, I'm quite proficient at the pastime of spending precious creative hours on the Internet. The same justifications for the bookcase apply, and look! I'm even closer to where I should be working... I should get double points for that, right?)
Okay, okay. So now we've learned to turn off the television, to only look in the Harvard Brief Dictionary of Music for that one single opus number, to not dust the table until we've written 100 words. We've mastered the tricks and traps of our own hearths. The studio calls, and resistance is futile. Now what? We go shopping, that's what.
Next... Caveat Creatrix, or Through the
Store-Window Glass and What Alice Found There
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