For some reason I was always bothered by people walking around talking into mini-tape recorders. I remember seeing it in movies growing up, and outside of Michael Keaton in Night Shift, I wasn’t a fan of the practice. Maybe it was just envy of watching someone have the ability to take their ideas down whenever they wanted. Perhaps it was the inherent smugness, the feeling they had that their ideas were sooo important that they couldn’t want to get their hands on a pen – oh no! – they had to archive them right now! Yeah, it was definitely the smugness.
Now, on the other hand, I understand it. Perhaps the usefulness of a personal recorder doesn’t fully hit you until you’re thinking about stuff to write. There are two common problems that pop up with me and my creativity that could be remedied, slightly, by recording my ideas.
The first is that I’m a quick thinker, and a slow typist. I’m not horribly slow. In fact, if I free-form and do the stream-of-consciousness thing I can get a nice rhythm going. I’m also pretty good at transcribing. The problem is that my head gets in front of my hands, and before you know it, I phrase have things mixed up. See? Sure, that was a rigged example meant to draw a reaction from you, but you get the idea… hell, you probably suffer from the same thing. I self-edit as I type. It can take me 30 minutes to send a simple e-mail because I have to reread it and fix my half written sentences to nowhere. Now if I recorded my ideas, and played them back, I’d only have to transcribe my ideas. Would you know it… I don’t self-edit when I transcribe. I can go into typist mode where I’m just focusing on the word and not the meaning of the sentence. Sure, this idea wouldn’t cut back on e-mail time, but it could be good for long form ideas, and maybe even blog posts.
The second problem is that I have my best ideas when I’m away from the computer. Something will pop into my head, and even if I have time to grab for a notebook, my hand isn’t fast enough to write the ideas down before they fade into the ether. Maybe you’ve tried it by writing down a dream. If so, did you ever have the feeling that the full details were starting to get more than a little fuzzy due to waiting on your hand, so you just sort of start to artificially fill in the blanks in hopes of remembering exactly what you dreamt of? At that point your own head is lying to you about what you just fantasized about, and it is all your hands fault… just like masturbation.
Now I see that the personal recorder lets you spit out your ideas when you’re the most excited about them. It doesn’t give you the chance to ponder and/or possibly forget what you believe at the time could be your big money idea. What it doesn’t do, however, is make you feel any less douchey about sitting around listening to an excited you spit out ideas like, “OK… a sci-fi story… like Star Trek… but with tits!” with an Einstein-esque zeal as if you’ve just figured out the theory of relativity.
Where does that leave me? On the fence. I know I put up some good arguments that are pro-recording, but I never got around to mentioning how I don’t like hearing my own voice. I always think about how I sound less like a man, and more like some bloated shim with blown out sinuses and a mouthful of cake.
Speaking of cake… why does my shirt smell like Cheez Whiz?
*I’m not editing this post at all just to drive myself insane. (Tough to fight the temptation to scroll up and proof read.)