Fictional Tip: Creating to White Noise

Nearly every creator has stared at a vast expanse of white struggling to set down the first few words of a story or the establishing line work of an image.  Faced with the stark emptiness and contradictorily endless possibilities that a blank page or canvas presents to a creator, the silence of a controlled - but equally empty - work environment can sometimes echo so loudly that it only compounds feelings of apprehension and paralysis.    Perhaps this is why many creators create with music playing in the background; Stephen King, for example, describes his preference for Heavy Metal in his memoir, On Writing.  Another near-cliche has writers seeking out the comforting ensconcement of the coffee shop, where relaxing surrounds and the ambient buzz of fellow patrons can ease the oppression of the creative void.  My preferred white noise of choice is the TV rerun - but only of certain varieties, and all with one prevailing virtue: I've watched them before.

The first variety is cooking shows.  My favorites include Alton Brown's Good Eats (which I've watched so much that I've taken to refer to Mr. Brown as "shisho," the Japanese word for "master"), Iron Chef (original Japanese program), and Jamie Oliver's and Gordon Ramsay's various series.  I've found that they provide a welcome distraction for the small part of my consciousness that serves as the eternal critic, deriding every creative thought that enters my mind and dares to transfer itself onto paper or computer screen.  (That part certain has its uses - namely in the editing and revising phase of creation - but it's a voice that needs to shut up when a work is in its formative stages.)  The acts and instructions of cooking are far enough removed from what I'm writing or drawing in order to keep the programs from being distractions themselves, as my having seen them before keeps me from becoming too consumed with what's happening there to neglect the work I'm creating.

The second variety is specifically Star Trek episodes from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.  I've seen these series enough times to usually recall the plot of an episode with no more than the first few seconds of the opening scene, so once again the danger for distraction is minimal.  Also, though the plots and milieu are somewhat uncomplicated compared to the stories I endeavor to tell, they for me also represent a large part of my foundational narrative: that is, I grew up with these stories, so at some elemental level, they possess poetic resonance with the very reasons that drew me toward storytelling in the first place.  

The third variety are Japanese-language programs, primarily documentaries and - predictably - cooking shows.  While this variety may be of best use for those creators who are familiar with more than one language, I find that having a program or even music playing with voice overs or vocals in a different language from the one in which I'm writing helps to keep the white noise from doing more than distracting your inner critic, and perhaps distracting or even interfering with your creative process itself.  I've encountered situations where the white noise I've employed had a detrimental impact on my writing, specifically where I had set my music player to repeat a single song - usually one that I'd only recently discovered and therefore wanted to hear over and over again.  Some of the worst, most melodramatic and pandering drivel I've ever typed resulted from the ad nauseum repetition of an otherwise perfectly good song, and I can't for the life of me explain why it happened.  But not only did the repetition confound my creative efforts, it also tainted my feelings toward the songs themselves, as I'd remember the atrocities against creation they had lead me to commit whenever I heard them after that.  Through this painful trial and error, I learned that repeating a single song while creating is a poisoned well that taints both the one who drinks from it, and the very watertable from which it springs.

So what lessons can we draw from these examples of white noise that worked and those that didn't?  I would say that successful white noise distracts your inner critic, thereby giving your creative mind the clarity it needs to do its job.  But it distracts in such a way that does not pull your attention away from the act of creating, or exert undue influence on the creative process itself.  

Ultimately, what works best for your white noise depends on your own background and preferences, though I would suspect that creating to white noise is a useful technique for anyone who has ever had their inner critic shout down creative ideas that should have been given the chance to make the blank page a little less so.  

What do you think about using white noise while creating, and if you use it, what seems to work best for you?