Ackerman's Synesthesia: the Writer's Habits

Photo from Flickr by Jonathan Kim. CC 2.0 General

Throughout high school, I was a part of a program for girls in creative writing in LA called WriteGirl. I am still a member of WriteGirl because once you start you never really want to stop. They were, and still are, such a good influence on my life and the lives of hundred other girls with big aspirations to become authors, poets, journalists, and countless other things. 

In the spring of 2020, I got matched with a weekly mentor. Rory and I would meet every week for a year straight, and we still try to meet up once in a while to keep writing. When Ackerman started describing the odd little habits writers had before they got any work done, I started to think back on my own habits with Rory. Some writers listen to one song until the piece is done, yes. Rory and I use songs as writing prompts for ten or fifteen-minute writing sessions. Sometimes, we'll use a specific lyric as a jumping-off point for our pieces, or we'd simply use the way the song made us feel. Interestingly enough, and just like Ackerman mentioned in the Synesthesia chapter, Rory and I slowly began to write on similar themes. We'd play a song and both write about grief or something. In the beginning, when we had first met, this was rare. We'd not often write things that were similar enough that we could link them together. Now, however, it's not uncommon that the songs or pictures or words we use as prompts will elicit the same reactions from us. Of course, our writing styles are different, and so the pieces we would write weren't identical, but it was still freaky enough that we started to take note of every time it happened. 

Rory always hits a little gong or music bowl (can't quite remember which it is) when our time is up, to signal I should put my pen down. I prefer to use gel pens when writing because it makes my handwriting smoother, the ideas get out faster. I can only write with noise around me. Music is a good way of getting that noise, but so is writing when I'm in a busy place or watching a T.V. show. Writing on paper is better than writing on the computer, but I've found my handwriting impossible to read, so I actually do try to suppress that urge to only write manually. Certain lines of poetry or certain illustrations will either inspire me so greatly that I could probably write about them for a long time or make it impossible for me to put a single word to paper. 

A friend of mine just recently helped me create a playlist for a new book I've started. The playlist follows the plot: tragedy, the life after, redemption, and then the idea of 'what could have been.' I owe a lot to my friend, I always find it difficult to be concise enough to get a playlist to follow the emotions I want to feel when listening to it. Ackerman's right when she says what we listen to can put us in the right emotional state for what we're doing. Otherwise, I'd find it hard to switch my brain to the places it'd need to be for me to get any writing done. It also staves off a lot of the writer's block that plagues me when I lose my train of thought. These habits ensure that I can always find my way back to where I was before. 

I don't think I realized that we all have these little quirks that make or break the task at hand. These things really do make the difference in the end.