I suspect that nearly everyone on the planet has an on-going conversation, rant, or lecture going on in their head nearly all the time. It’s that famous monkey-chatter the authors of the popular meditation and other metaphysical books admonish us to banish from our minds. We are forever rehearsing what we’re going to say to someone, delivering that riposte (which we didn’t do in real life) that wins the argument we lost in real life, asking questions for which we need good answers, talking to ourselves about something we saw on TV.
With writers, of course, it’s not always random thinking, arguing, or chattering. We’re composing in our heads. If it’s not in our own voice, then the characters in our novels are talking to us and we’re listening to them. We’re probably also watching them. Nearly every novelist I’ve ever met or whose work I’ve edited has told me that the characters just take over. Sometimes they’re hard to direct. Impossible to boss around. That’s certainly true of my work. As I tell the authors whose novels I’m editing, however, I am—and we are—still in charge of gooder English. Our characters can talk any way they want to, but we the authors are the ones in charge of spelling and punctuation.
Most of us have juke boxes in our heads, too. Bands playing, Singers singing. Rock. Opera. Disco. Folk. My guess is that composers and lyricists have sort of the same kind of process as writers: they listen and write down what they hear. Some people listen to the radio or CDs while they write, but the musical accompaniment to my days is almost entirely in my head. This is because I learned back in graduate school—when I was reading Milton ( allof Milton) and Shakespeare (ditto) and all those other guys who were filling the 17th and 18th centuries with literature—that it’s easier to concentrate if you haven’t got the TV or the radio going. To this day, I listen to CDs when I walk, but I like it quiet when I’m working. But still … there’s music playing in my head. Mostly Gilbert and Sullivan. Also songs from musicals I’ve seen or soon will see. Songs sung by Michael Ball, all of whose CDs I have in my car. The occasional unidentifiable snatch of music. I read somewhere that brain scientists believe these musical bits in our head last about 20 seconds, then either fade away or switch to something else. Being obsessive ( moi??), I replay those 20-second snatches of music over and over until I can identify them, which sometimes means I have to look at my DVD collection until I figure out where this music comes from. When I find it, I can sing or play the rest of the song in my head. And while the music is playing, I’m still talking to myself all the time. I talk in my head to my authors and explain (as tactfully as possible) why I’m deleting redundant paragraphs or moving sentences and phrases to improve logical or narrative flow. Giving little grammar lessons—“Just so you know, anxious means worried. Eager means happily anticipating.” “As written, the ironing board is turning on the iron. Is that what you mean? Take another look at Strunk & White, Rule 11.” “Be more careful in your choice of adjectives and adverbs. Use modifiers sparingly and only when they really add something to the sentence.” “That’s a really great paragraph!”
And the inner me just keeps nattering on. I saw A Chorus Line a couple weeks ago. My friend Angelo and I saw Cats last Friday. Hey—I wonder if the dancers who auditioned for the chorus line ended up later as cats. Did Mr. “I Can Do That” later become Mister Mistopheles? Angelo says I need a twelve-step program for musical theater. No, no, no! Well, maybe I’ll think about it after the next show. After he gets our tickets for Arlo Guthrie at Royce Hall. After I get tickets to Nathan Gunn at the Segerstrom Center. One of these days. I promise. After I’ve seen Sugar and Anyone Can Whistle and The Mikado, all of which I already have tickets for. (For all of which I already have tickets? I have a T-shirt that says “I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you.”) (And now I have “Old Deuteronomy” and other selections from Cats are playing in my head.) Am I a ticketoholic? I totally deny it. Oh, well … maybe Angelo’s right. Darn.
I stop typing, get up to take my shower, another idea gallops through my head, I sit back down at the computer. When my friend Max came to visit and gave me her poster of Hypatia, I told her I didn’t much like the movie Agora because it was too simplistic. Max (who knows more about goddesses and women’s history than anyone else on the planet) agreed with me. I framed Max’s poster and hung on the wall in the hall, necessitating moving two or three other things hanging there. Let me see…. I’ve got eleven new things hanging on my walls that I didn’t have when I moved in. No, twelve. That includes the Cats program, which I framed and hung in the bathroom with the cat cartoons, and a witty “cat zodiac” my friend Liz sent me. It also includes a post card I received from a women’s museum. It shows three of Niki de Saint Phalle’s giant dancing women. I framed it and hung above my bibles. Sitting smack on top of my bibles are a stuffed Cheshire Cat and my tiniest witch book and tiniest witch (gifts from my friend Nyx). On the shelf directly below the bibles are books by Mary Daly. Commentary? You betcha. (And I was using that phrase several years before Mrs. Palin made it famous.) Argggh, enough already. Gotta take my shower and get to work and earn my living. And now “The Jellicle Ball” is playing in my head and I’m thinking about my author in Pasadena and wondering … do I really want to add punctuation to her poems?
"Well," I say out loud, "it really is time to stop this nonsense and work on my blog." Oh, gee (she says with mock surprise), I just wrote it!