Further on my forgetting
Sep. 5th, 2010 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI wrote a post for Book View Cafe a fortnight back, about how walking has become an inherent part of my working day. What I may not have mentioned - I forget, but I think I forgot - is how I have been through the whole parade of note-taking mechanics, from cheap pads to expensive filofaxes to devices for taking dictation, and none of them works for me. I really am not a note-taking animal. I think about work, I try ideas and phrases and dialogue out in my head, and I try to remember it all.
And, yup, we know how well that works; but I've learned to live with it. Or without it, rather, all the stuff that I think of while I'm out and forget before I get home. I have learned, as my dentist says, to accept the space. (He says this about the tooth that we are both fairly certain that he's going to extract on Tuesday: shall we fit a prosthetic, or shall we accept the space?)
Today I'm trying to write another BVC blog post, about structure. So I was walking to the supermarket and thinking about that, and I built myself the perfect sentence. And repeated it to myself a dozen times, trying to embed it in memory, knowing all the while how rarely that actually works - and then I thought, "Wait a minute! I have a mobile phone in my pocket, and an answering-machine at home: I can give myself dictation!"
So I did that, I phoned myself up, and when I answered I tried to recite this perfect sentence, just as it sat in my head there.
Reader, I forgot it. Halfway through, I totally stalled out on a word, and couldn't get past that refusal.
The message as recorded contains long silences, the sounds of distant traffic, the closer sounds of my swearing at myself as I tried in vain to recover.
Is this another fine notion gone entirely west? I'm not sure. I did in fact remember the lost word on my walk home, and have rebuilt my sentence*. So I might try this again, in cases of future emergency**: but I don't suppose it'll become an essential part of my process.
*Since you ask: Every story has its shape, the logic that holds it all together, the truths of character and worldbuilding and consequence; these are the familiar structures of our own lives.
**And yes, I am totally keeping this one recorded message, as an awful life-lesson to myself.
And, yup, we know how well that works; but I've learned to live with it. Or without it, rather, all the stuff that I think of while I'm out and forget before I get home. I have learned, as my dentist says, to accept the space. (He says this about the tooth that we are both fairly certain that he's going to extract on Tuesday: shall we fit a prosthetic, or shall we accept the space?)
Today I'm trying to write another BVC blog post, about structure. So I was walking to the supermarket and thinking about that, and I built myself the perfect sentence. And repeated it to myself a dozen times, trying to embed it in memory, knowing all the while how rarely that actually works - and then I thought, "Wait a minute! I have a mobile phone in my pocket, and an answering-machine at home: I can give myself dictation!"
So I did that, I phoned myself up, and when I answered I tried to recite this perfect sentence, just as it sat in my head there.
Reader, I forgot it. Halfway through, I totally stalled out on a word, and couldn't get past that refusal.
The message as recorded contains long silences, the sounds of distant traffic, the closer sounds of my swearing at myself as I tried in vain to recover.
Is this another fine notion gone entirely west? I'm not sure. I did in fact remember the lost word on my walk home, and have rebuilt my sentence*. So I might try this again, in cases of future emergency**: but I don't suppose it'll become an essential part of my process.
*Since you ask: Every story has its shape, the logic that holds it all together, the truths of character and worldbuilding and consequence; these are the familiar structures of our own lives.
**And yes, I am totally keeping this one recorded message, as an awful life-lesson to myself.