A Little Peace and Quiet

What do you listen to when you write?

There are people who write best in public places like coffee shops. They thrive on the buzz of activity around them. There’s even an app that recreates the sounds of a coffee shop for you when you can't actually get to one.

I’d love to be one of those people sitting in a hip neighborhood coffee shop bent over my MacBook, pouring out my genius on the page. Those people always seem so cool. Unfortunately, I am not ever going to be one of those cool coffee shop writing people. I’m too much of a people watcher. I have to look up every time someone walks by or comes in the door or orders a mocha latte. I have to eavesdrop on the conversations around—I am literally physically incapable of tuning out these conversations when I'm alone and supposed to be working. This is not a situation conducive to productivity.

A lot of people write to music, and can be very particular about what music they listen to for each project. Sometimes authors will even provide a list of the songs they listened to while they were writing a book. 

I’d like to be that kind of writer. I used to be that kind of writer, actually. I used to compile playlists to match the tone of the whatever I was writing and listen to them on repeat while I was working. 

And then somewhere along the way I had to switch from vocal tracks to instrumental music, because the lyrics became too distracting. So I rediscovered a lot of classical music I hadn’t listened to since childhood (my parents were both big classical music fans) and I downloaded a lot of film scores. I loooove film scores. They’re all about mood, and if they’re from a movie you enjoyed they can provoke intense emotions and sense memories. Sometimes I watch movie trailers just for the music.

But at some point even instrumental music became too distracting for me. It pulled me out of the world in my head and dragged me back into the real world around me. 

So I had to start writing in silence. Which would be fine, if it wasn’t for leaf blowers and power washers and pugs who snore like a rutting javelina and pit bulls who have panic attacks at the first hint of thunder and sit on my foot panting at one hundred rpms. Did I mention I live in a city where we have almost daily thunderstorms? 

Beans would like it very much if we could move to a desert please and thank you.

So, yeah. Silence is not always so easy to achieve.

I tried earplugs, which I have often used for sleeping with great success. The problem with earplugs, though, is that while they dampen external noise, they tend to amplify internal noise. Every time you swallow, every time you click your teeth together, every time you move your neck, it's like it's being broadcast over a sound system at top volume. It’s both distracting and a little bit horrifying.

And then I discovered the miracle of white noise. It’s soothing. It’s unobtrusive. It drowns out everything that’s not inside my brain just enough that I can lose myself in my own thoughts for hours at a time. Hallelujah! 

It’s probably doubled my productivity. No lie.

There are lots of options in the white noise game. Expensive machines and fancy web sites. Personally, I use a dandy little iPhone app called Simply Noise. It’s always with me and it gets the job done. 

Now if only if only there was an app that could do something about dog farts ...