A Word in Your Eye

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-41-dongwon-songs-personal-writing-process

Key Points: Chaos corner. Fitting writing around a day job. Negative space. Meditative, not focused. Jot notes, free-flowing, baseline thoughts. Then walk away. How do you capture that? Voice memo, text a friend, but if it slips away, let it go. Cultivate boredom. Tap into your sensations. Sit quietly in an empty room. Put the monsters in a box in your notebook. Multiple projects? Prime the pump! This is hard to do, so be generous to yourself.

[Season 20, Episode 41]

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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode 41]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] My own personal writing process.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So, this week, we're continuing our conversation about our individual writing processes and we are now talking about my process. So, welcome to the chaos corner.

[Mary Robinette] I thought mine was the chaos corner.

[laughter]

[DongWon] I think we're going to find that a lot of us are the chaos corner.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I think there are some overlaps with my process and Mary Robinette's, most notably in the it's very irregular. Right? I, as some of you may know, have a day job. That day job is very demanding time wise, it is very unpredictable in terms of when I wake up in the morning, I often don't know what my day's going to look like. I'll have meetings [garbled] but I'll look at my email and be like, oh, this is on fire today. I guess that's my day now. Right? So a lot of time, when I'm going to be busy and what's happening that day is very hard for me to predict ahead of time. So I don't really have scheduled time to work on creative projects. So, for me, I'm really fitting writing around the main thing that I'm doing with my life, which is being a literary agent working with my clients. Right? So I think my process, of everyone here, probably looks the most like working around a day job in terms of not being a full-time professional writer. Right? So, yeah, I mean that's the first thing is I'm trying to fit these things in. But when it comes to process itself, I think where I start to differ from Mary Robinette is I think a lot about the negative space around my writing. Right? So when I sit down to work, I need a very, like, aesthetic, orderly, clean space, low stimulus. So, like, I don't like playing music while I work. I don't like other distractions while I work. I sometimes will work in a coffee shop, but I do find airports and transit... Anything where there's lots of stuff happening to be quite distracting. Right? And so what I kind of need is to be able to... Not necessarily focus... See, I don't think of it as a hyper focus, I think of it as a sort of just like empty space in which it's almost like a more meditative state, rather than a focused state, if that makes sense. To me, there's a distinction between those. And so what I think about it is removing things from the space until I'm at a place where I can actually get my brain to latch onto the things I want it to latch on to. Otherwise, it will find anything else to latch onto in my space around me. Right? So it often starts with me taking a notebook out into my backyard, sitting down in the sun with a cup of coffee, and just jotting down a handful of notes in my true free-flowing mode. I'm not making an outline, I'm not doing any of that, I am just writing down, like, okay, here are the baseline thoughts. If I need to write an essay about this. If I'm doing a piece of world building for a game, if I'm planning a session for a game, if I'm doing a lot of that writing work, a lot of times it is like... Just really start with like simple sentences, what is this essay, what is this piece of the world I'm trying to figure out, what is this character or this plot, things like that. And then just writing down a handful of notes. And then I put that down and walk away from it for a while. Because what I've done is write down the questions so that my brain can chew on it in the background while I go do a bunch of other stuff. Right? A lot of my process is maximizing my unconscious brain's flow so it will solve the problems while I'm not looking at it. And then when I reach for the answers, they'll be there. Right? And so what I'm trying to do is seed it with the information, the questions that I need to ask it. And then walk away and come back. It's almost like Tarot in a weird way. You know what I mean? It's like here's my question. Now I'm not going to look at you for a while, and I'll come back and see what the output is.

[Erin] So... I love that. And it reminds me of people saying, like, when they're in the shower, they'll get, like...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] The great idea, because, like, it's the time in which... I don't know, anything can come to the surface. So if you're letting things happen in the background, how do you make sure that when the answer comes, like, you're ready to capture it? You know what I mean?

[DongWon] Yeah. I'm not always... Every now and again, it will come to me in a quiet moment, like, yeah, in the shower or while I'm on a run or whatever it is, or out on a hike, like. Those are useful moments. So, to capture those, voice memo's really handy. You know what I mean? Just grabbing your phone and being like, here's the crazy idea I had. Or texting a friend. You know what I mean? They're like, hey, I just had this idea, what do you think about this? Right? In part, a lot of what I do is very collaborative. Very rarely am I just working in a vacuum, because a lot of it is writing for games. So, I'll ping one of my players or I'll ping another GM that I work with or something like that and be like, hey, here's stuff I'm thinking about. What do you think about this? So I have that that I can do. And... But a lot of times, if I have the thought in a place where I can't do those things and it goes out of my brain, there's no... I don't regret losing it. If I lost it, it wasn't worth hanging on to. Right? I'm trusting my unconscious brain to do that work. And if it still thought it was a cool idea and it was relevant... A lot of times, when I've gone back to dig those up, I'm like, ugh, that ain't it.

[laughter]

[DongWon] You know what I mean?

[Mary Robinette] Yes, we know.

[DongWon] What feels like genius in the moment, when you wake up from a dream or those kind of things, very rarely holds up under further examination. Right? So a lot of this is about cultivating spaces where I'm not actively engaging with something else. So if I'm going on a walk or a run or something and I bring a podcast, my unconscious isn't going to be doing that work. If I go without headphones and just truly do the chaotic thing, using a word that the kids use that I'm not going to use right now, I'm just going to like walk around without headphones and really let my brain think about the thing. And, like, taking in stimulus, taking in the sunshine and the natural world and looking at birds or whatever, but not actively doing things, that lets my brain sort of start feeding me these answers when I sit down to write.

[Howard] I can't remember who said it, but it was the... Some recent science where someone said it looks like the key to creativity is boredom.

[DongWon] Yes. This is a thing I say all the time to writers, and I say, cultivate boredom. If you're having trouble getting the work done, if you're having trouble coming up with ideas, if you're stuck on something, and this works for me, is become as bored as you possibly can. Sit in your house. Do not play a video game. Do not watch television. Do not read a book. Do not put music on. Sit in your living room and stare at the wall, I swear to God, until you want to claw your skin off. Like until you are itching and furious, and then you sit down at your computer and you will write exactly what you need to write. Right? You need to let your brain rest sometimes. Your brain needs that rest break. This actually all comes from, like, me taking a bunch of cognitive science classes when I was in college is when I started thinking this way, and then over time, I started to, like, putting these into practice in different ways that worked for me. These may sound like hell to a lot of people. But a little bit of torturing yourself by not doing something, I think, can really help activate your brain when you go to sit down and do it.

[Dan] I know... I guarantee that there are people out there listening right now, screaming about the luxury...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Dan] That you have of being bored.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Dan] Of not having kids running around screaming and things like that. But that's not really, I think, the point you're trying to make. You are not exulting over the fact that you have a bunch of free time. What you're really telling us is talking about how to fit these things into...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Dan] The time that you do have.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Dan] Taking a moment here where you happen to have some time to jot down ideas and then let them percolate until the next time you have some time. It's not all about being completely free in an empty room all day for hours.

[DongWon] True. And also, I don't have kids, I don't have pets. Like, my life is quite simplified in a certain way. But also I'm incredibly busy and doing a million things all the time.

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] So it's hard for me to make that time. What I will say is think of this as work time. When I'm talking about this, use your time that you set aside to write to do this. This is work. And I want to, like, make that really clear. You can say I'm taking 2 hours to write and then what you do is walk out of the house without any headphones and without your phone and walk around for an hour and come back. You've done writing work by doing that because you let your brain do that unconscious work. And I think one thing that peo... When people switch to full-time writing, they discover very quickly that they can't write for 8 hours a day, you can only write a certain number of words and then your brain kind of finds its maximum. For some people, that's an insanely high number. For some people, that's only a few hundred words. Either way around, those people are being productive with their writing day, because you're using that rest of the time to process. And what I'm saying is use your writing time where you're not putting words on the page very, very intentionally. And sometimes the intention that you need to bring to it is nothing, negative space, and cultivating that boredom.

[Erin] Yeah, I was also going to say, I think we've gotten very good, or we... By we, I'll say me... At like putting distraction into times of boredom. So, like, the number of people who, like, bring a phone into the bathroom, a time in which you could theoretically just be doing nothing mentally, at least, hopefully, and just, like, in your space. Or waiting in a doctor's office or... Like, there are times in which, like, the world actually kind of forces you to wait and not do other things. But I think nowadays, like, you tend to think oh, that's a time where I'm going to check my email or whatever. I definitely do that. And so I'm... As you were talking, I'm thinking about even if they're just, like, a moment like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I'm in the shower for a second, like, not listening to music or letting that be quiet time...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As opposed to time that I feel like I should be using. Because I think sometimes the productivity trap...

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] That can happen is the feeling that you should always be doing something with your time, even if that something is just Doom scrolling.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] And so therefore if you're in the shower, like, shouldn't you also be listening to a podcast or doing this other thing or... Instead of just saying, like, I'm just going to stand still. I think the just stand still in life is something that our lives really push us against.

[Mary Robinette] There's something you said earlier about removing barriers and distractions.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And I actually wrote it down because I'm like oh, yeah. No, that's a very good point. Because there's... There are things where I am the one who has introduced the distraction.

[DongWon] What you were saying last episode about you need to protect your time from yourself. And we're talking about the same thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] In many ways. And with that, I would like to go to a break. And when we come back, I'm going to talk about being embodied while you write.

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[DongWon] Welcome back. Yeah. We've been talking about cultivating boredom as part of your writing process, and the ways in which you need to be sort of present in the moment to let your brain sort of do the work of processing. So that creative well is there when you go to sit down and write. Erin was making the point that you can use these very small moments. I mean, when I say get bored, for me, that doesn't take 4 hours.

[laughter]

[DongWon] That takes about 30 seconds before I'm like, what's happening on Instagram.

[Howard][garbled] more seconds than I need.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. I mean, we live in a world that has monetized our attention. Distraction... Every device in your house wants you to pay attention to it and is designed almost maliciously to create that relationship with it. Right? And so resisting that takes a lot of willpower and focus and intention and all of these things I'm talking about. But it is really important to... For you to make that space to work creatively. And I want to talk about that relationship to your physical body. Right? Because in these moments, a lot of times what you can do is tap into sensations to help you get out of that distraction. What am I feeling in my body? What is my breath doing? Where... How does my leg feel sitting on this chair? Right? And sometimes those aren't always the best sensations. Right? A lot of us have bodies that don't cooperate the way that we want them to. But I think even in those moments, connecting with what is my physical presence in this room and in this space can help you access a space that lets your brain sort of have the freedom to roam and wander a little bit. And, like, really, what I'm talking about a lot are meditation practices. Right? What I'm... This is meditation without saying you have to sit there and meditate. Right? But a lot of meditation is just observation. You sit there, you move through your body, you think about what your body is doing, you feel your breath, all of those things. And you just don't chase thoughts as they occur. You let them come. You let them pass. Don't chase them. Don't hang on to them.

[Mary Robinette] Do you do those in the space that you're planning on writing, or is that a separate... Are those two different?

[DongWon] Both. Often, I will start the process in a place where I am not writing. I will leave my office, because my office is a place of incredible distraction. Right? In part it is... The same computer I play video games on. It's the same computer my email lives on. Right? So it's hard for me to have that sense of lack of distraction when I'm sitting in my office chair. So I will go sit in the backyard, I will go for a walk like I mentioned. All of these things can be really helpful for that meditative process. Right? Even going to the gym, even though you're being active and doing things, being that complete psychopath in the corner without headphones on at the gym can be a really great way to access that. Because when you're doing something that active, it is forcing you to be in your body in the way that I'm talking about. And then you're not thinking about your email, you're thinking about oh, God, I have to do another set. Right? And so I think those things can be really, really helpful.

[Dan] I absolutely love what you were saying about how the modern world has monetized our attention. But I want to point out that while there is a new flavor to it, that's been around forever. A quote that I attribute to Renee Descartes, I don't know if it actually is, and I parrot this to my kids all the time, is "All of Mankind's ills stem from our inability to sit quietly in an empty room." And that constant need for distraction has been around forever. And the... I love what you're saying about how to break past that. Because it's one thing for me to just tell my kids this all the time. That doesn't actually help them do it. Right? That doesn't help them find ways to entertain themselves. So taking those principles of meditation, taking those... These kind of mindfulness concepts of being aware of sensory input and what's around you all the time. Those are actual tools you can use to overcome this need for stimuli.

[DongWon] Yeah. And, the thing I want to point out, and... Excellent point, that this has been around forever. Right? This is also very influenced by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Right? Very similar concept of you need that space to write, you need your own space in a way. And protecting that from other demands in your life, including family and work and all these things, which are incredibly difficult to do. I want to flag another aspect of it, though, that kind of ties in with what you're saying, is that to do the thing that I'm talking about, of being truly present in your body and alone with your thoughts, in a room with no other distractions, is very, very scary when you start doing it. It is very, very scary because you will feel the emotions that you feel in a direct and unfiltered way. And that is a hard thing to do unless you have practiced doing it, and unless you have gone through some therapeutic and healing processes.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to recommend a free resource which is Balance. It's an app. Sorry, I'm telling you to use your phone. But they have a... It's an easy way to go into meditation, and they have a couple of tracks on focus. Which, if you need guidance on learning how to do this, you can start there and then you can... You don't have to keep using it.

[Erin] I do have a question. Like, I love this, but how do you deal with... It reminds me of something Mary Robinette was talking about in the last episode with the idea that like there are things waiting. Like, there are monsters of the things you need to do and the people you need to care about waiting outside your room of calm, and not feeling like a guilt or like starting to associate the time you're taking for yourself...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As time you're taking away from other things that you should or would be doing?

[DongWon] Before I do this, I trap them. I go out and I put them in a little box, and that box is my notebook. So before doing this, and I do this before I go to bed, actually. You were talking about this when you wake up. For me, this is a pre-bed ritual. When I get... I sit down with my notebook in my office, I close the door for like 5 minutes and I write down all the meetings I have for tomorrow, all the tasks I have to do, here's my... The things that I need to read, here's the emails I need to respond to. I make my to-do list the night before. And that way when I go to sleep, I'm not sitting there turning and thinking about it. And this really helps too with making that space, is I can't go and do the things I'm talking about until I've done the thing first of taking those monsters and writing a little box around them, and then they live there for the moment. They're contained within my notebook, and they will be there when I open my notebook up again to yell at me, but for this particular moment, they're over there. Right? So that's a really excellent question. And that is kind of my strategy for managing it. Which helps with anxiety, which helps with that pressure and all of these things.

[Howard] I love the idea of putting the monsters...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] In the box. That's... I do something very similar. What I wanted to say, though, is that the quote that Dan... About sitting in an empty room. It's Blaise Pascal.

[Dan] There you go.

[Howard] I had to Google it.

[Dan] I had the wrong mathematician.

[Howard] All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Which, yeah, that's awesome. But the first result I got when I searched was Moliere. You're going to love this. All of the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes which fill the history books, have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.

[laughter]

[DongWon] I find it very appropriate that you went to the comic response to it. Yeah.

[Howard] But the thing... In a room alone, and, if you look at what dance really is...

[Mary Robinette][garbled]

[Howard] It is a mastery of self, a mastery of movement, a mastery of physical interaction with others in a partnership. I don't know that those are the same thing, but they're definitely two sides of the same coin.

[DongWon] I mean, movement is meditation practice. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] This is why yoga is a meditation practice. There are breathing meditation practices. We think of meditation in the Zen Buddhist way, you sit there very quietly with your legs crossed and don't think thoughts. That's a very specific approach. Right? What I believe is taking a shower can be a meditation practice.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Going for a walk, going for a run, going to the gym, dancing. The people I talk to who love to dance or professional dancers I've known all talk about it in the same way that I think of meditation practice as being very effective. It's why I like really hate stuff like Power Yoga, because it's sort of like wow, you guys have wandered off the point here.

[laughter]

[DongWon] In my view, in my view.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That is... If you get something out of it, great. And if what you're getting out of it is movement and fitness and exercise, fantastic. But... Anyways.

[Dan] I want to ask how your process handles multiple projects. Right now, I have a book that I am outlining, a different book that I am writing, a different book that I'm revising, and an RPG campaign that I run every week.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] When you give yourself this blank space and let your brain just kind of percolate on whatever it needs, is there a way that you assure it's thinking about the right project?

[DongWon] You gotta prime the engine. This is the process I was talking about at the very beginning of this, of you sit down and you write a bunch of just random thoughts about the project that you're working on. Right? And so if you prime the engine with those questions, then the next thing it's going to chew on is those questions. Right? So if I need to work on an essay for the newsletter, a thing I have not done in too long...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But... If I'm going to sit down or... If I'm working on... Because I'm often running multiple games, too. So what I will do is sit down, write those questions and those thoughts, and then go off and do something. And that sort of helps me sort of focus the unfocus. If that makes sense. It gives it a direction. And I think one thing that people are missing in this process is that intention setting at the beginning of it. And this is intentional boredom, is one way to think about it. Right? And so you need to set that ahead of time, and that's like priming the pump. So, great question.

[Howard] Yeah. If you're accidentally bored, then you might not be ready to exploit...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The output of the boredom.

[DongWon] That's how you end up chewing on that thing that you said in 6th grade that was embarrassing one time.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I'm... One of the things that I'm struck by as we're having these conversations is how different your process is from mine, but how many of... There's some places where I'm like, oh, yeah, I do that. It just looks different when I do it. Like I had a coffee shop that I loved because it was about a 5-minute walk and it was just enough time and I would think about what I was going to write. And so when I got there, I was ready to sit down.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It was that kind of priming the pump. Sometimes, I will literally write down at the top of the page, here's the mood.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it's that intention setting. It looks totally different, but I... I'm fascinated by the overlaps.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You both have an orc problem, and one of you has trained with a sword and the other has trained with hiring mercenaries who have swords...

[laughter]

[Howard] And on that note, there are multiple ways to take care of these orcs.

[DongWon] Yep. Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] And it all comes down to a sword.

[DongWon] And it all comes down to a sword. The other thing I want to flag here is... I talk about this with great authority over the last 20 minutes or so, but I'm not good at this. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] This is really hard to do.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And I succeed at this maybe one time in 10. Right? I spend a lot of my time being too distracted by the distracting world I live in, by being too delighted by a video game, by wanting to watch a TV show, by wanting to hang out with my partner. There are all these things that like intrude on this time. It is very difficult to make this space. And this kind of goes back to what Dan was saying earlier of, like, all that sounds nice, but look at my life, it's so full and distracting. This is ideal practices I'm talking about. And again, this goes back to last week's episode, Erin, you sort of brought this up in terms of habit versus what I would call practice is be forgiving to yourself when you fail at this. Because you're going to, because it's really hard to do. And I do all the time. Lord knows, I'm behind on every project I've ever worked on. Right? And so I think understanding that this is an optimal version of it, and these are the things that work for me when I'm able to do them. But I'm also saying as you're pursuing these goals of mindfulness and intention and all that, to be really, really generous and kind to yourself throughout this process.

[DongWon] And with that, we're going to end this episode and have a little bit of homework for you. And I think you might be able to anticipate what it is from what I was just saying. But I want you to go sit somewhere. don't bring your phone, don't bring your headphones. Somewhere in your house, go for a walk, whatever the things are that we've been talking about. And really cultivate that boredom. Sit there for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever you have time for. Until you feel that itch of like irritation of doing nothing. And then push it a little bit longer. And then go sit down and write.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write. After being bored.