on the wrong side of sunrise

Tag: school

I’m going to hack my brain (but I’m not qualified to instruct you as to how to do the same)

Not so long ago, I claimed that I would finish out the semester and then give an update on my plans for the future. I still intend to, but for now, a brief digression.

I graduated last Sunday, with a double major in creative writing and psychology. And here’s the thing about undergrad psychology students: we have a tendency to feel more knowledgable than we actually are. This can be handy—if you want something in your life framed in terms of rats in a behavioral psychology lab, for instance, I am your girl—but also dangerous. It’s not so unlike the pre-med student who decides to diagnose friends or go Charlie Bartlett and open up an amateur psychiatry clinic. There’s a sweet spot between total ignorance and sufficient expertise where you know enough to really mess things up, if you’re not careful (even if you try to be).

This is why I say that, when I discuss how I’m going to use psychology on myself in the coming paragraphs, I am not encouraging anyone else to do the same. This is not I earned $50,000 last year working from home, and you can too! (Although really, you should probably be wary of that, too.) This is also why I call it brain hacking. I’m not a qualified life coach or motivational guru, just someone trying to break into somewhere with security about at the level of password1234.

So, with that disclaimer, here’s my plan to hack my brain.

We all know Pavlov and his dogs: ring a bell before you feed the dog and eventually the dog will start to salivate when the bell rings. (Sadly the set-up was not nearly as pleasant for the dogs as one might hope an experiment centered around food would be.) Classical conditioning is all about stimulus pairing.

Something similar to this is useful in setting up routines. Writers talk about their Writing Place, or their Writing Notebook, or their Writing Sweatpants—whatever it is, it’s something that has become linked in their mind to writing, so that the simple act of going there/opening it/putting them on/etc. kicks their brain into writing mode without any conscious effort on their part.


Photo credit: Maria Brundage

This is why I’m very particular about pens, for instance, and having different pens for different situations. I have my general purpose pen, my writing pen, and my revising pen, which is purple rather than the standard red. It’s also why, whenever I embark on a big project, I make a project-specific playlist. Even now, I think of my tenth grade novel whenever I hear A Perfect Circle’s “The Outsider”—but only the version that was on the Resident Evil: Apocalypse soundtrack. If I’d seen the movie first, perhaps that would be different, but as is, that song comes on, and there I am, perched on a window ledge before class, off-brand Discman tucked next to me, working on that old, terrible novel. I can’t claim it makes me drool with desire to return to the project, but there’s still that instant association.

Without applications or final projects tying up my writerly energy, I find myself with time to write on my own terms … and struggling to really commit to it. There’s time to write, sure, but it’s not Writing Time, and I struggle to get “in the groove” in that sense.

The key, I think, is those associations, those triggers. Those things that make you feel, in your gut or salivary glands or whatever, that it’s time to write.

Now that the term and my undergraduate studies are done, I’m wholly responsible for making my schedule. With that and Pavlov in mind, I aim to maximize it. Find all sorts of ways to trigger the “It’s writing o’clock!” impulse. Maybe I’ll even get a bell. Who knows? The future’s full of surprises.

Relationship Status: writing on Sternberg’s triangle

In the fall I took a psychology of human sexuality course with Dr. Pamela Landau. Thus far, it’s the best class I’ve had here, and I came out with a very different perspective on people, relationships, and myself—and an inability to see the Simplex-brand exercise equipment in my neighborhood fitness center without thinking of herpes. Part way through the term, we discussed Robert Sternberg’s triarchic theory of love. It’s based on a triangle:

Each point represents an aspect of love—intimacy, passion, and commitment—as well as the form of love associated with only that aspect; each leg represents a combination of the forms at its ends, and in the center is the blend of all three.

I say I’m between projects right now, but that’s not quite right. I’m between projects with which I’m in consummate love. Here’s a sampling of what I do have:

1. A fully-drafted novel. I completed the first draft in December of 2010 and got about two-thirds of the way through a first heavy revision before becoming distracted by life (a poor excuse, I know). I would say this project and I have a romantic relationship: I feel close to it, and I care about it … but I haven’t committed, and I don’t know if I can.

2. A partially-drafted novel. I started this one more recently and got maybe a third of the way through. It’s hard to say, though, because I never developed a good sense of the thing as a whole—which I suspect is why I drifted away from it. This I think would fall under infatuation, because it’s a project I was excited about and, if I returned to it, could see myself being excited about again. But I don’t have that level of intimacy yet, and I haven’t even committed a full draft to (digital) paper.

3. A partial short story. I don’t know where it’s going, and although I started strong, now every time I open the document, I plod along through a few half-hearted paragraphs before becoming bored. Still, it’s what I’ve been working on, so I keep working on it. This is clearly empty love—lacking intimacy and passion, at this point little more than a way to be writing something.

4. A concept for a story about an android with an autocorrect function. This seems to me like fatuous love, because I’ve held onto the idea for a while and I find it enjoyable … but I haven’t gone any deeper than that conceptual surface level.

5. A draft of a short story. It’s drawn very heavily from my own life, so there’s a great deal of intimacy, but I think all there is to our writer-writing relationship is liking. I look at it and consider revising it but feel no particular drive to, and I don’t picture myself going anywhere with it.

In life, a relationship drifts around in the triangle as the dynamic changes. The writer Edith Wharton speaks to the writer-writing relationship drift when she says, “What is writing a novel like? 1. The beginning: A ride through a spring wood. 2. The middle: The Gobi Desert. 3. The end: A night with a lover.” (She goes on to add, “I am now in the Gobi Desert.”) I see the same thing in my own writing, and I worry about being dissuaded by Gobi fatigue.

Perhaps what I need to do right now is to take some time to examine myself as a writer. Writing without having more deliberate intentions seems sort of like wandering into the Gobi Desert, blindfolded and wearing impractical heels. If writing is building a relationship, I ought to treat it with the same care I would any other relationship.

Or, perhaps, even more.

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