The Writing Wizard: Sound and Noise

English expository writing

writing tutorHello! I am the Writing Wizard, and I’m thrilled to be joining the Cambridge Coaching blog to discuss focusing tools, organizational skills, and editing tricks for better writing in academic and admissions contexts. 

In my first post, I want to talk about something that every writer, everywhere must confront: the blank page.  More specifically, I’m going to discuss some key steps that a good writer should take to prepare him/herself for the task of writing.  Whether you stare mindlessly at the blinking cursor or chew on your pencil while zoning out in front of your clean sheet of notebook paper, you know the feeling of that strange sense of inertia that precedes a first draft – you’re ready to write, you’ve got all your ideas laid out, but the words don’t come.  Now, I’m not talking about writer’s block – a separate scenario where you literally don’t know where to begin – but about another form of mental suspension: the state you’re in where you know exactly what you want to say, but you lose focus right when you should, ostensibly, be ready to roll.  Why does this happen, and what can be done about it?

Our brains are incredible multi-taskers, formidable engines of computation that can handle trillions of bits of data at once. 

We can be thinking about our English paper, and about our dog, and what we’ll have for dinner, how we feel about global warming, our friend’s birthday, our cousin’s new car, the temperature outside and our comfy new socks all at once.  Not to mention all the non-formed thoughts that run through our brain simultaneously as so many blips of sensory information—noises we hear in the background, things we see and feel, emotions and memories we’re dealing with below the surface… It might not seem at first glance that we are struggling with our English paper’s topic sentence because of our new socks or the sound of the dishwasher down the hall, but these little packets of data whooshing around in our mind are in fact a serious part of our experience of thinking and writing.  Whether we realize it or not, they are making claims on our attention, and while we can’t necessarily ignore them completely, we can learn to tune them out.  

One major tool for helping us focus on writing, and for helping our brains get back to the writing process, is to master the distinction between sound and noise

A very simple way to set them apart is to say that a sound is a piece of information that we listen to attentively, and a noise is a piece of information that we just hear in the background.  The pianist Glenn Gould used to practice at home for performances with a huge Hoover vacuum cleaner turned on and placed on top of his grand piano, drowning out the notes he played.  He told his friends that the noise forced him to concentrate more deeply on feeling the music, both through his touch on the keys and through his attention to how the music sounded in his head as he played.  Because he couldn’t hear the piano in the room, he trained himself to respond to the piano in his head.  Audiences were always astounded at the sensitivity and nuance of his playing, in hushed concert halls across the world. 

When we sit down to write, whether we sense it or not, our brains have turned on the vacuum cleaners and they’re roaring away.  We might not hear the racket, but it is easy to be overcome by all of our mind’s extra information: anxieties, appetites, curiosities, emotions, sensations, connections, distractions.  To really get ready to write, it’s important that we learn to zero-in on the sound and cancel out the noise.  

One big way to do this is to remind ourselves of what we’re supposed to be doing.  When I sit down to write, I either think or actually say to myself (and you can call me crazy for doing it…): “OK, Brain, time to write this paper!”  Then, I close my eyes, and I focus intently on what I want to say.  Although I always take good notes and prepare an outline, I leave those things for the moment, and I just sit with my eyes closed, thinking.  In my head, I see the first few ideas come together, and I work hard at pushing other, invasive thoughts out of the way.  Whenever my mind starts to wander – noise coming in to my thinking – I take a deep breath and think about the paper again. 

It’s a lot like meditation, except that instead of having no thoughts, you’re allowed to have one thought, but only one. 

When I feel maximally focused, and I can literally see the words coming together in my brain, I open my eyes, and pounce on the keyboard.  Each time I feel my mind wandering while typing, I repeat the pattern.  Sometimes I get so engrossed in writing like this that I don’t even hear things happening around me – doorbells, cell phones, fire alarms… 

The trick is to set your mind at rest, and then to fill your restful mind with thoughts that are just about the work you have to do, and nothing else.  Once your brain is comfortably focused on your work, the ideas and words will start flowing – the same words you thought you had ready all along, the sound underneath all that pesky noise.  

Manoah holds BAs in English & French Language and Literature (UChicago, Phi Beta Kappa), and an MA, MPhil, and PhD in French Literature (NYU). He is a Student Affairs Officer at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Columbia.

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