I think your friend is indeed very wise Sharlee. The constant 'noise' syndrome happens to me too . . . . especially when I'm doing something physical like vacumning or driving. Getting it down quickly on paper before it leaves is the tricky part. A poem started to form in my head one day while driving. Fortunately Heather was with me and she got out a pen and pad to take my dictation while on the road. In less than ten minutes that poem was on paper and the 'noise' ceased. It was nice having a private secretary handy; otherwise I would have had to pull off to the side of the road for a while. :-)
Thanks Dawn for you sharing your experience... I do believe that especially creative people - what ever form that creativity might take - do have the danger of 'overload'. Again going back to visual journals I think that is why that process is so good - it allows the mind to empty and it also allows for the next creative bit to start. One of the tutors at my course (writing) used to encourage us to take a notepad with us where ever we went... The reasons being (i)it was good to record impressions of what was going on around us,snippets of overheard conversations, etc. She suggested that if we couldn't write it the next best thing was to sketch it no matter how simple or rough it was - it would be a record of that particular image or feeling, etc. This really worked wonders to get the creative juices flowing...
Writing the reply to Dawn made me think of the creative writing class I was taking a few years ago and a writing exercise we were asked to participate in. We were taken on a 'walking tour 'of some of the local landmarks around Melbourne. These were an array of different things - free standing sculptures, a mosaic mural, statues, and even a building or two.
At each point we were given a time limit to write what we saw - it could have been a physical description about the piece we were looking at, or perhaps the people around us who were curious to know what we were doing, thoughts and impressions we were having either about ourselves, the environment, or the piece we were viewing, and anything else that issued a response from us. At some of the pieces the tutor led us through the writing exercise by giving us words prompts such as nouns, verbs to trigger responses. By the time we returned to the class room we were all brimming with not only ideas but very full notebooks which in a way were our visual journeys of the exercise. We all compared what we had written and how we wrote it - some people had mind mapped, others had written long hand, one person had drawn images with small trigger words...
I particularily liked one piece of metal, free standing sculpture. It was a very large piece taking over several feet both length and width. It also had this wonderful curve to it and I just had to allow my hand to follow the 'journey' that it made until I couldn't reach any more. I had this amazing connection with the piece and it no longer was an metal sculpture in the gardens of Mellbourne, but a highly intelligent beast of the sea making a dive to the shadowy depths of the ocean floor. I have walked by this piece from time to time and it still reminds me of those responses I had to it - to me it will always be that beautiful whale...
The irony was not lost though on most of us - we were for the large part natives of Melbourne who had passed by these pieces time and time again without ever really seeing them. It demonstrated to us that in order to create a landscape or a backdrop to our writing all we needed to do was open our eyes, our imaginations and our notebooks. I will try and source some of the images and post them here at some point...
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That is very interesting! I'd like to try that. Sketching or writing a 'sketch'.
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