![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Finding my groove...
Jul. 30th, 2013 10:54 amIt should be pretty obvious to everyone that if you do something consistently and often enough, you will develop a facility for doing that something. Riding a bike, writing an essay, driving a car, speaking a foreign language, rolling a poker chip over the knuckles... rare is the person who can do these things smoothly or well upon the first try, but after some practice, skill is developed.
In that last sentence, you'll notice I lump mental activities in with physical activities. That's because, when you get down to it, everything is a mental activity. There is no such thing as "muscle memory," per se. A pianist's fingers do not "remember" how to play the piano, but over many hours of practice, over many years, the mental "subroutines" that govern finger movements assume the same status as those used to walk, or drive a car. In the case of the latter, you no longer have to concentrate on what to do to turn left, you just do it.
But I digress...
Some years ago, I noticed that sometimes, after fruitlessly concentrating on some problem, a solution would occur to me the next morning when I got up. It was almost as if there was some "background" processing going on while I was sleeping, that made itself manifest by the appearance—out of nowhere—of an apparent solution. From what I've been able to determine, such solutions are the work of the subconscious mind.
There came a point where I would deliberately concentrate on problems I was interested in getting solutions to, and I was not entirely surprised to find that while this approach was not sure-fire, it nonetheless did yield a surprising number of answers.
Another example: A few years ago, I was participating in LJ Idol (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
therealljidol) and found myself bereft of interesting personal experiences to write about, and even throwing my subconscious into the act wasn't coming up with any answers. So I started to write fiction pieces—consciously and with great difficulty at first—but I noticed that the more such pieces I wrote, the easier it became to come up with ideas for fiction pieces, especially in the way things had to combine to make a story hang together.
The story I posted yesterday is probably a bit on the long side, but I felt compelled to write it because Gary's prompts pushed my mind into various directions, and the result just "flowed" for me, starting with my "Hemingway" session at the Palermo in Baikonur.
Based on my experiences with subconscious problem-solving and story-idea generation, I've found it's entirely possible to "lose" the knack through inaction, in much the same way that muscle tone disappears without exercise. Participating in LJ Idol is apparently enough of an incentive for me to overcome that inaction, at least as far as writing is concerned (my own LJ posts don't count). Surely there must be another way?
Hmmm, perhaps I should concentrate on how to overcome this "inaction" outside the scope of LJ Idol?
In that last sentence, you'll notice I lump mental activities in with physical activities. That's because, when you get down to it, everything is a mental activity. There is no such thing as "muscle memory," per se. A pianist's fingers do not "remember" how to play the piano, but over many hours of practice, over many years, the mental "subroutines" that govern finger movements assume the same status as those used to walk, or drive a car. In the case of the latter, you no longer have to concentrate on what to do to turn left, you just do it.
But I digress...
Some years ago, I noticed that sometimes, after fruitlessly concentrating on some problem, a solution would occur to me the next morning when I got up. It was almost as if there was some "background" processing going on while I was sleeping, that made itself manifest by the appearance—out of nowhere—of an apparent solution. From what I've been able to determine, such solutions are the work of the subconscious mind.
There came a point where I would deliberately concentrate on problems I was interested in getting solutions to, and I was not entirely surprised to find that while this approach was not sure-fire, it nonetheless did yield a surprising number of answers.
Another example: A few years ago, I was participating in LJ Idol (
therealljidol) and found myself bereft of interesting personal experiences to write about, and even throwing my subconscious into the act wasn't coming up with any answers. So I started to write fiction pieces—consciously and with great difficulty at first—but I noticed that the more such pieces I wrote, the easier it became to come up with ideas for fiction pieces, especially in the way things had to combine to make a story hang together. The story I posted yesterday is probably a bit on the long side, but I felt compelled to write it because Gary's prompts pushed my mind into various directions, and the result just "flowed" for me, starting with my "Hemingway" session at the Palermo in Baikonur.
Based on my experiences with subconscious problem-solving and story-idea generation, I've found it's entirely possible to "lose" the knack through inaction, in much the same way that muscle tone disappears without exercise. Participating in LJ Idol is apparently enough of an incentive for me to overcome that inaction, at least as far as writing is concerned (my own LJ posts don't count). Surely there must be another way?
Hmmm, perhaps I should concentrate on how to overcome this "inaction" outside the scope of LJ Idol?
