The Brain Drain and Gain

There are always stories about how birth rates rise around the times of events like major black outs. Dave's best mate is a point in question. He believes that he was conceived around the time of a major flood that had his parents cut off on their farm, probably without power. While the jury is out as to whether this can be statistically and accurately shown ... it remains one of those urban myths ... when the TV goes off the act of creation goes up.

I can't help but think, after reading Clay Shirkyon's article Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (graciously forwarded to me by the ever roaming Catherine) that as writers and artists ... a big step towards being creative is turning the TV off. Or perhaps it's the first big move in becoming creative. Not only is it a displacement activity, it's a drain of time, energy, creativity and what Shirkyon calls our 'cognitive surplus.' He estimates that Wikipedia represents 100 million human hours of thought and that is the equivalent of what American's waste watching television ads in one weekend.

In Australia the tide is turning. The Australian newspaper reported in March this year that for the first time the average hours spent on the internet exceeded that spend infront of the box (13.7 hours a week online and 13.3 hours in front of the box, compared with 12.5 hours a week online and 13.8 hours watching TV in 2006.)

Shirkyon writes:

"And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation." On the most current Australian data - we're already there ... shifting just over 2.5% in one year.

He goes on to comment:

"However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter ... It's better to do something than to do nothing."

And that's what happened when I turned off the TV. I started to do 'stuff'. There would have been no time to run a magazine solo for three years, care for a rapidly growing and insatiably curious little boy, and keep my sanity if I had have been sitting ogling the box for hours at night. If I had have been cavorting with the TV last year and not on line participating, I would never have begun writing again ... and here I am, 'producing, sharing and consuming.'

I'm not an avid TV buff - I never really have been, but I used to waste my nights infront of the TV because it was on ... even when there was nothing showing that interested me. The TV has that kind of hypnotic effect on you.

I dont watch commerical TV at all and haven't for around three years now (after tiring of putting up with the rolling of eyes and groans from Dave as I watched CSI - my last bastion of commercial TV) The TV only goes on when we want to watch something specific. I am lucky to watch three hours of TV a week now. There's my Wednesday stable of favourites on the ABC - Spicks and Specks + two British comedy shows (currently the IT Crowd and Armstrong & Miller). I used to watch Life on Mars on a Thursday night (which finished the first week in April) and Robin Hood on a Sunday evening, which has also just finished. Which means it's down to Wednesday night TV ... just 90 minutes of TV a week. For the first time ever I'm proud be well below average!

Instead of frying my brain, I'm online or writing - or in the case of blogging, both! I dont suggest that I'm doing anything as big as Wikipedia (yet?) or writing the next Puliter Prize winner ... but I'm doing something. I'm glad that my cognitive surplus is being used in more industrious ways and will hopefully continue to do so in bigger ways in the near future ... after all Shirkyon says it was the industrial revolution, which spawned the five day working week that created free time and a cognitive surplus - may as well put it to good use.

How much TV do you consume a week? Is TV the evil enemy of your muse or do you have another brain drain (gin perhaps - for those who read the full article)?

Blogging 90

As part of my post Artist Way creative contract, I commited myself to blogging everyday. That was about two weeks before other things exploded behind the scenes (in a good way). I'm finding that while my creative energy is going into spawning new ideas, or expanding and refining others that my ability to string together words is failing me. But I've said that I'll show up here ... so here I am.

There's a number of articles the lovely Catherine has sent me through that I'd like to weave in here .. but I haven't got around to reading them properly. It was a busy day. And then there is the writing that I promised a friend that I would look over for her. I think I've only read 8 or so pages of the 42 that I printed out. Not to mention the fact that I havent given my latest short stories the once over so I can take them along with me to writing group tomorrow. These things seem to creep up on me ... crawling, crawling, crawling and then whammo - its tomorrow.

So I've blogged ... and I've walked today. Two ticks for me and now its off to bed!

Live Earth - Paul Kelly - From Little Things Big Things Grow

This seems pretty appropriate for some of the things brewing here ... especially for those who believe in business being ethical and socially just.

Prompting Ideas 2

I never expected that I would be following up Prompting Ideas with another post ... but here I am. Over the last week I have been totally blown away, firstly by the generosity of people to share how they come by their ideas. Thank you to Eamon, Tricksy Pixie, Dan, Smiler and Catherine for sharing what works with you. It’s such a change of pace to be sharing what works, rather than what doesn’t.

What none of us spoke of was sharing our ideas with others. I have to admit that normally this would not readily spring to mind – but the past week has been an epiphany in that respect.

I shared an idea with a couple of family members and a close friend, who all gave me their overwhelming support for my idea. Then I shared the idea with a colleague who got even more excited about it than I did … and from humble beginnings (remember the drip concept), to the light bulb flash … something big, possibility really big is brewing – but it only happened when I shared it.

Had I not shared, I probably would have over thought the idea, looked at it from too many angles, searching for reasons why it could not or would not work, until I had beaten it to death with my own sense of pessimism and commited it to the waste paper basket of my mind. But this time I didn’t.

This gives me great confidence in sharing my ideas. Now, from a creative angle, its time to have the confidence to start sharing plots, characters, idiosyncrasies with others and relish the feedback that comes from sharing. As they say – “from little things, big things grow.”

So … go forth and share your ideas … an idea shared is an idea fertilised!

To blog or not to blog

Paul writes: "There is a book festival taking place in my part of London, so I'm attending some talks on writing. At the first one, the speaker mentioned "displacement activities" that writers fall into to avoid writing. She reckons blogging is one of them. Is blogging detrimental to writing?" I can almost see the teams lining up for the negative and affirmative, a la high school debating style.

Firstly, what is a displacement activity? Is it really relevant to use it in terms of blogging and writing?

Wikipaedia describes a displacement activity as:

• an activity that is the result of two contradicting instincts in a particular situation. (Birds, for example, may peck at grass when uncertain whether to attack or flee from an opponent; a human may scratch his/her head when they do not know which of two options to choose from),


• often involves actions to bring comfort such as scratching, drinking or feeding.
  

A simpler description is just something that we do when we should be doing something else - (does this just make displacement activity a fancy pseudo-psychological term for procrastination?) Some of the displacement activities listed at The Sanctury are:

• tidying up (yep - it was always really obvious when Dave was procrastinating from writing his Master's thesis - the townhouse would be SPOTLESS - he'd even mop the white tiles!)
• cook
• go to the shops (I'm a sucker for this one!)
• alphabetise stuff
• make music compilations (the above two make me think of High Fidelity)
• lose your keys (there is a great story in one of my Goddess books about a woman who lost her keys to avoid having to go to one of the rituals - she didn't even realise that she'd self sabotaged at the time!)

From the purely instinctive definition - suggesting that blogging is the result of two contradictionary instincts seems to be a bit absurd - or is it? I have experienced displacement activites such as these, when I've been writing uni assignments or doing editing work. When I couldn't decide what to write at uni and the intellectual brakes crashed on, I used to take myself off to the fridge for Tim Tams. In our townhouse this meant going downstairs ... and the process of going down the stairs, munching on the Tim Tam and coming back up the stairs was enough to clear my mind and set a writing course again. Mind you it's not good for your health to be eating 11 Tim Tams in the space of a few hours (nor the wallet when your living on Austudy).

In terms of using blogging as a distraction from writing - well isn't that an oxymoron. After all, blogging is writing ... or are we now talking about 'real' writing and 'pretend' writing - like we were discussing last week with books - 'literature' vs popular books. To me, any writing is better than no writing ... and this is where my own personal experience kicks in.

Prior to January last year (when I first signed up for My Space) I had done no regular creative writing since high school (that's around 15 years). There were sporadic bursts throughout that time - but I just didn't write every day, or even a few times a week. I did keep a journal for many years but as of 1997 even that went by the wayside, and then finally personal correspondence. It was a symptom of being in a destructive relationship.

In 2000 I took two creative writing courses, but that couldn't inspire me into writing on a regular basis. During the end of 2001 I wrote quite a bit, but that soon dropped off to nothing, over shadowed by uni, then pregnancy, motherhood ... which brings me back to January last year.

I'm not sure why I signed up for MySpace. No one else I knew had a My Space account - it was probably the beginning of breaking out of the jail cell of early motherhood, as I quested to rediscover myself. This was when I was first exposed to blogging ... and well I started writing. I wrote a little bit, then I wrote some more ... a few extended autobiographical essays such as 'To all the shoes I've loved before'. I started hanging out quite a bit on Mystic Medusa's blog, where I met Dan and Catherine.

It was through Dan that I found out about Write Stuff and started to do Friday Fiction. Then Dan asked who wanted to do the Artist Way with her. We blogged our experiences in a private blog, I got a Blogger account and began to put my Friday Fiction up, then my experiences of doing the Artist Way. I got a kick out of having people read my work and it inspired to write.

Every proponent of writing, every 'how to write' book specifies two simple points - write and read. Is that not what blogging is - the ability to exercise both of these necessary elements of being a writer. If I hadn't blogged in the beginning, I would never have made it to the point that I am now.

I would argue that if blogging is considered a displacement activity - then so is reading. And like everything - it's a matter of moderation. You dont blog to the point where you spend no time doing creative writing (or whatever the writing is that you do), just as you dont read to the point where there is no time to write - nor write to the point where you no longer have a life to creatively fund your writing.

I've found that articles (because I write non fiction as well as fiction) have sprouted from something that I have blogged about - there are currently two blog entries that are awaiting recreation as magazine articles. Without blogging they would never have seen the light of day.

As I've just commited to 90 days of blogging every day, to support my creative recovery - I guess I'm subjective in believing that blogging is not detrimental to writing. I'd like to think that there are plenty more things detrimental to writing ... such as watching TV, holding down a full time job and being in unsupportive relationships. I'd be interested in knowing what other displacement activities were spoken of Paul.

I know that since taking up writing as a career - I've all but given up drinking alcohol (just a tipple here and there now), almost kicked my addiction to being busy, stopped investing in others and started to invest in myself.

I'd say it was more apt to look at how writing as a displacement activity - and the manner in which, if you're serious, writing assists in removing all those toxic activities that hold you back from reaching your creative potential. But that, perhaps, is a whole new set of discussions points!

Quote for the day

From the National Soybean Research Laboratory website

Until you try, you dont know what you can't do

Henry James

1001 books you must read before you die

Shelfari has a list of the 1001 books you must read before you die .... the irony being there are 1087 books on the group's shelf? It's set out in centuries and looks to be far more representative than the lists we've posted to date - but probably still very anglo-centric.

I've read 24 books on this list:

• Wild Swans


• Perfume


• The Godfather


• Chocky - saw the BBC series and then had to read the book which started it all


• To Kill a Mockingbird - intending to re-read this and pick up all the things I missed as a 14 year old


• A Town Like Alice - loved the book and the 80's mini series with Helen Morse (ironically the daughter of my Mum's GP as a kid) and Bryan Brown


• The Lord of the Rings


• Day of the Triffids - I had a John Wyndham thing happening as a teenager - I also read The Chrysalid and tried to get through the Kracken but I think my love for his writing had waned by then ... to be overtaken by Virginia Andrews if I remember correctly :(


• Nineteen Eighty-Four


• Animal Farm


• Grapes of Wrath


• The Hobbit


• Brave New World


• All Quiet on the Western Front


• Of Human Bondage - after reading a collection of his short stories a few years earlier and as a rebellion against some 'well meaning older friends' who told me the it was too depressing for me to read at that point in my life!


• Dracula


• Frankenstein


• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn


• Treasure Island


• Alices Adventures in Wonderland


• The Fall of the House of Usher - I'm pretty sure??


• The Picture of Dorian Grey


• Little Women - I got the six book "Little..." set for Christmas one year and then lost 'Little Women' buggering up the set


• Robinson Crusoe

I also started - but didn't finish

• Interview with a Vampire - never got into it, but loved the movie


• Name of the Rose - as above


• Arcadia - it was Dave's book and had to be returned to the library before I got through it- just never got around to reborrowing for whatever reason (oh yeah I had a baby not long after that!)

As for Dave - well of course has read at least 10% of the books on the list - 106 to be exact (so we wont be listing them here) plus three he started and couldn't finish (including Finnegan's Wake) and nine others that he's not sure of!

As Tricksy Pixie commented below - these lists do always make you feel inadequate. I've read more than 24 books in my life ... but these lists dont feature the books that happen to have graced my night stand ... my penchant for Patricia Cornwall, my deep love for Raymond E Feist, my recent interest and enjoyment of Kate Forsyth's series, my well read obsession with Dean Koontz in my 20's ... and of course I could go on - but I wont.

So to sum up - MY all time five favourite books are:

1. Magician - Raymond E Feist (I try and read this every year if possible)
2. Charlottes Web - EB White (again I read it every year when I was a kid - and should revisit it)
3. Women Who Run With Wolves - Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes
4. Lightning - Dean Koontz
5. Sahara - Clive Cussler

Not classics (other than Charlotte's Web maybe?)- but cracking good yarns. Where to now Paul - ideas for discussions for this week that don't revolve lists of books nor diabolical plans to take over the world of publishing?

What books have you read on the 1001? What are you five favourite books?