I don’t like silence. Even as a kid, I would beg and plead for the radio to be turned on while I had a textbook open. Of course, when I was really little, no one paid me any mind, they just sent me outside where I whooped and hollered like a banshee. Once I got to teenager status, I turned the radio on and damned the consequences while I studied. Test times would really just make me squirm. Nothing like a silent classroom to really mess with your mind. I NEED background noise. I can’t survive without it. I might not be able to tell you exactly what is playing at the moment, but you’ll catch me bobbing my head around and unconsciously dancing around if I’m standing. To me, music is nearly the air I breathe. So it always fascinates me when people say they can’t stand to have noise when they are trying to focus.

I mean, does this mean they work-out with no headphones?

Wake up to the buzzer on their alarm?

Heaven forbid, could it be that they don’t sing in the shower or in the car?

For work to be in progress, there actually has to be noise in the background. Somewhere inside of your head, there actually has to be something going on- a conversation, imagery that you can hear being described. While writing, if there is silence, it’s like the TV being on after midnight.

Hellion- “You know that they play stuff on TV after midnight, right? It’s just not a black screen with no sound.”

Sin- *puzzled look* “What?”

*pirates shake their head at the non-observant Sin*

Marnee- “There hasn’t be white noise on TV since 1989.”

Sin *still puzzled* “Hm. Oh. Hm. Very curious indeed.” *readjusting her leg warmers*

Terri *shaking her head*- “Soon we’re going to have to lock her up in a home if she doesn’t quit wearing the Flashdance outfit and thinking she’s still cool.”

See, if you only hear silence then you become very unobservant and this applies to your writing as well. Silence is understated because we crave it so much in our daily lives that we really don’t realize what silence actually means to our creative side. Work in progress demands we listen to everything around us for any little thing we can use, laboring deep into the night and along the early fringes of light. This might work us into a “temporary” silence, but that’s because at this point you’re so mentally exhausted the thought of having one more moment disgust you.

But there’s something about waking up the next morning with eyes swollen from the lack of sleep that brings that low buzz of your thoughts right to the forefront. What would it be like to have constant silence? To never hear your thoughts. To never hear your voice? How would this effect your overall writing? I’m not talking about the superficial hearing but the type of hearing that feeds your characters. If your work-in-progress is just an extension of your thoughts, if there was only silence, would your writing be flat and two-dimensional? I think it would. I know at times when I’m frustrated and nothing seems to work out write and the static is at an all time high, my writing and my voice suffer to the point it doesn’t even sound like me.

So, with all that being said- How do you hear things? Do you hone in on one thing or do you hear it all from the thoughts in your head to the shouting kid in the candy aisle? Do you require silence to focus? (And this applies to readers too!) And if you have too much silence does that stifle your creativity?