MY LEFT BRAIN AND MY RIGHT BRAIN AREN'T GETTING ALONG
I have always been a night owl. I stay up late. Sometimes really late. I usually go to bed around 3:00 a.m. I've never really had a job where I had to be at work early, so even though I LOVE being up at 6:00 in the morning, I don't understand how people can get out of bed at 6:00 in the morning. These days I get up somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 (or sometimes earlier if the cats are being particularly jerky and/or playful). My day goes downhill form there quickly. Without having a regular schedule, time just evaporates. At the end of the day, I wonder where all those hours of daylight went. There are a lot of things I want to do -- and a lot of things I NEED to do. One of those things is write. I don't write anymore. After I left my (writing) job last year, I just stopped. Talk about your writer's block!
I read an essay the other day by Merrill Markoe. She is probably best known as the original head writer for David Letterman's old NBC show (she was also Dave's girlfriend for many years). She is the one who was largely responsible for Dave's location shoots, which I always thought were brilliant (does Dave even leave the studio anymore?). After she left the show (which I think happened when she and Dave broke up), she turned to writing books. Over the years, she seems to have developed a real dread -- if not an outright hatred -- of writing: "Writing is what I have done for a living for the last 35 years. And when I say that the process was not the least bit enjoyable, it is only because I would struggle to find words strong enough to describe how agonizing it had become and how much I had learned to hate it."
After being sidelined for several months by a sudden and unexpected need for double hip replacement, she re-thought the way she wrote and theorized that turning a left-brain activity into a right-brain activity might change things for her. The way she did that was force herself to write upon waking in the morning, while her brain was still half-asleep. And that changed everything for her, making the process much easier and making her vastly more productive. (The essay/blog post is "How Not Being Able to Walk Taught Me How to Write" is here.)
It's weird to think of writing as being a "left-brain" activity. The left brain is (in her words) "...the hemisphere that handles all of life’s homework: the organizing, the structuring of patterns, the math. It's not much fun over there but it's what we use to pay bills and make to-do lists. [...] And of all the creative arts, the only one that is centered in the left brain is writing. The right brain is where all the fun stuff like music and painting takes place. The right brain is intuitive and provides us with a kind of global interactive awareness of our surroundings. It's where the floaty dreamy drifty enjoyable nirvana stuff lives. When I used to paint, I would marvel at how I could sit down to paint, then get up and not know where the last 5 hours went."
I don't really understand why writing would be a left-brain activity while other creative endeavors (like painting, dancing, or playing music) would be right-brain. All are creative, all require at least a modicum of structure.
Whatever the case, for me -- until just recently -- writing was always easy, always fun, and the time just disappeared. And now ... it's very difficult. I'm sure most of this has to do with a general depression of being unemployed, etc., but it's worrying. Why not give Merrill's theory a try? Can't hurt.
Since I read MM's essay, I've forced myself to get up fairly early and start writing before I'm fully awake. At this point I'm only at the "just get ANYTHING down on paper, regardless of whether it's any good" stage, but it's been nice to sit at my computer and do something that doesn't involve getting sucked into wandering aimlessly around the internet.
Onward.
Merrill Markoe
I read an essay the other day by Merrill Markoe. She is probably best known as the original head writer for David Letterman's old NBC show (she was also Dave's girlfriend for many years). She is the one who was largely responsible for Dave's location shoots, which I always thought were brilliant (does Dave even leave the studio anymore?). After she left the show (which I think happened when she and Dave broke up), she turned to writing books. Over the years, she seems to have developed a real dread -- if not an outright hatred -- of writing: "Writing is what I have done for a living for the last 35 years. And when I say that the process was not the least bit enjoyable, it is only because I would struggle to find words strong enough to describe how agonizing it had become and how much I had learned to hate it."
After being sidelined for several months by a sudden and unexpected need for double hip replacement, she re-thought the way she wrote and theorized that turning a left-brain activity into a right-brain activity might change things for her. The way she did that was force herself to write upon waking in the morning, while her brain was still half-asleep. And that changed everything for her, making the process much easier and making her vastly more productive. (The essay/blog post is "How Not Being Able to Walk Taught Me How to Write" is here.)
It's weird to think of writing as being a "left-brain" activity. The left brain is (in her words) "...the hemisphere that handles all of life’s homework: the organizing, the structuring of patterns, the math. It's not much fun over there but it's what we use to pay bills and make to-do lists. [...] And of all the creative arts, the only one that is centered in the left brain is writing. The right brain is where all the fun stuff like music and painting takes place. The right brain is intuitive and provides us with a kind of global interactive awareness of our surroundings. It's where the floaty dreamy drifty enjoyable nirvana stuff lives. When I used to paint, I would marvel at how I could sit down to paint, then get up and not know where the last 5 hours went."
I don't really understand why writing would be a left-brain activity while other creative endeavors (like painting, dancing, or playing music) would be right-brain. All are creative, all require at least a modicum of structure.
Whatever the case, for me -- until just recently -- writing was always easy, always fun, and the time just disappeared. And now ... it's very difficult. I'm sure most of this has to do with a general depression of being unemployed, etc., but it's worrying. Why not give Merrill's theory a try? Can't hurt.
Since I read MM's essay, I've forced myself to get up fairly early and start writing before I'm fully awake. At this point I'm only at the "just get ANYTHING down on paper, regardless of whether it's any good" stage, but it's been nice to sit at my computer and do something that doesn't involve getting sucked into wandering aimlessly around the internet.
Onward.
Merrill Markoe