Noise Levels and Other Considerations

by Janis Patterson

This is a noisy world. There are sirens and neighbors and families and appliances… and not even noise-cancelling headphones can guarantee total silence. At least, not at my home with a house reconstruction going on to the west and the neighbor to the east – though a wonderful man in many ways – owning every gasoline-powered piece of lawn equipment ever made. His lawn is beautiful, though.

Now all writers are different. Some like lots of noise, claiming it is a stimulant, while others like pure silence as they say it frees their creativity. Depending on the time and our mood of the moment I daresay most of us fall somewhere in between.

Some writers swear by writing in different places – cafes, car parks, just about any place you can think of. Now when we have to be someplace besides our office, a writer can work almost anywhere, especially a writer under deadline. Have to take your child to ballet practice? Need to get the car worked on? Have a lunch hour at work? You can take a laptop or one of those keyboards that feeds  into your phone (I keep meaning to get one of these, just as soon as I get a phone which can handle it), or even a humble pen and paper, then make use of the time to up your word count.

Other writers believe in total silence – or as total as one can achieve short of moving to an uninhabited mountaintop in some third world country. Noise-cancelling headphones help, as sometimes does a white noise machine, but nothing can truly drown out the noise of the modern world.

As I usually do, I stand firmly in both camps. There are times I write happily in front of the blaring television while listening to The Husband tell me about his day, and other times I have on my headphones, my office drapes drawn and a sign on the door threatening a dire fate to anyone who disturbs me.

So what is the best way to write? I can only speak for myself, but as always my practice varies. If I had to choose just one atmosphere, it would be classical music (either full orchestra or piano only – no screechy strings, please) playing softly in the background, preferably of an emotion and tempo appropriate to whatever I was working on at the moment. After that, as pure a silence as could be achieved. Of course, I would – and have – made do with whatever had to be undergone at the moment.

By contrast, I have a friend – an excellent writer – who is addicted to writing in cafés. Now I admit there are advantages to writing in a café, foremost of all being to command endless cappuccinos by the mere raising of a hand! On the other hand, there is a constant swirl of people and babble of conversation, to say nothing of being the object of curiosity by the customers (“They’re real writers? And they’re working on books?”) for all as if we were some sort of exhibit in a raree show. I am no shrinking violet when it comes to being in the public eye – far from it – but not while I’m trying to concentrate on work.

However – being a fair individual and willing to experiment, I have joined my friend on occasion, and yes, despite being interrupted by spectators telling me about how they have always wanted to write a book, or have a sure-fire idea for a best seller, both broadly implying that I should stop and either teach or co-write with them (grrr) I managed to get a fair amount of writing done. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really writing – just lots of typing that, on a cool-headed reading the next day, was barely one baby step away from garbage. I didn’t try to save any of it, but I did go put on some Chopin, close the drapes and the door and try to salvage the underlying idea.

By contrast, my friend actually wrote a short story that same afternoon, one when it was polished, she sold.

How boring life would be if we all worked exactly alike!