I spent the morning working through a very large purging project in the “creativity room”, a place where, lately, very little creativity has been happening at all.
This room, divided in half with a desk on my wife’s side for her work, and a desk on mine the doubles as a place to create both my analog collages and these attempts with words, has long become a dumping ground and storage space for every knickknack and ambiguous piece of furniture. It’s become far too cluttered and become something far from its original purpose for me to fall into the kind of focus and flow needed to produce anything without great effort and distress.
So, I’ve been avoiding the room entirely, and my desk, and my art and writing because I can’t relax or think in there. I can’t connect old ideas or generate new ones without anywhere to “spread my mind out in”, you know?
The bulk of the work so far had been throwing out those items I haven’t used or even thought about in months or years and that will certainly give me the space I need but there is a harder and more delicate task to tackle after of sitting down and working through the mountain of scrap paper and old notebooks containing just about every thought that has occurred to me over the last many, many years.
Yes, I am a compulsive note-taker. Most of the notes are useless nonsense I jot to remember a task, an item from the store, a thing I read or saw, or mean to read or see, but there are a few small gems buried beneath: ideas for blog posts, essays, zines, and even books I scribbled while working or in the dead of night and never went back to expand or develop. Now they sit, contextless and nearly indecipherable, waiting for review, reflection, revision, and reshuffling into something that resembles real writing.
I had thought to transcribe them into Google’s Docs or Keep apps, but I think a new Are.na channel might be more interesting. I can then connect each note individually to other channels to give them that missing context and purpose as I decide what each thought means, or can mean.
Going forward, I am going to carry a pocket notebook with me everywhere and at least weekly transfer the useful ideas to Are.na (or an index card system that I can keep in a nice and tidy box on my desk if I decide to go full analog). The hope is that through regular review of the notebook, I can then set those ideas free from their frozen prison of paper and turn them into long-desired blog posts and essay attempts.
I’ve never had an issue generating ideas in the moment, the struggle has always been in returning to those ideas and making time to do the work, the writing. Today is a chance to clear the slate, the desk, the mind and begin developing and expanding ideas but developing and evolving a system that feeds the writing.
Lisa Marie Blair 