Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "meditation"

Rock musicians like to note that, had they not discovered their talents for destroying ear-drums, they’d have been criminals. It adds some edge to their pampered personae. Here’s my claim to edge: had I not been a writer, I’d have been locked up long ago, but not in a jail. At best I’d have been sedated.

I know this for sure, because when I’m between drafts of a novel I feel the old madnesses creeping up on me. The dark resentments whose origins I can’t quite nail down. The tension around the center of my chest and the heavy breathing and the tight jaw and the voice in my head telling me this isn’t fair, whatever it is. The flickering fantasies penetrating my mind when it lacks the focus that otherwise keeps it calm.

My wife sees all this before I do, at least consciously. “Maybe you ought to work on something else while you’re waiting to start a new draft,” she says, gentle and delicate, as if she were waiting for me to respond with an angry “I’m all right, dammit."

I have to take a break, you see, because writing a novel requires for me at least 10 drafts. Read a book 10 times straight and see if you don’t get bored with it. Or really pissed off.

So when I get through a draft, I take a week or so before I get back into it. As the end of the draft approaches, I start to fret about that week. I can’t take an actual vacation, because I always tell myself that I don’t know precisely when I’ll reach the end of the draft and therefore I can’t book a trip in advance. I try to line up some reading related to the subject of the book, but sometimes the books turn out to be duds or I’m done with them in a day and a half.

This time, as I take a break between drafts of my novel about the great Italian painter of the early seventeenth century, Caravaggio, I find myself sweating it out in the desert heat of Jerusalem. Enervating, indeed. I’m already a little fevered in any case, because I’ve been deep in the psyche of Caravaggio, who was both a brilliant artist and a duelist with an explosive temper.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

I’ve written here in the past about how I use meditation techniques to get into the zone for writing every day. But now meditation seems to have helped me come up with the idea for my next novel.

Last week I was in a rotten mood. My son woke up too early. I hadn’t slept well. The boy was whiny and tossing his Cocoa Crispies on the floor. The crema on my espresso was too thin. Oh, blah blah blah. I packed Cai off to kindergarten and lay down to meditate, as I do before I begin work every day (I used to meditate after I finished work, but I often just fell asleep, so now I do it earlier).

I focused on creativity and positivity as I meditated. I started to get ideas about… well, I’m not going to tell you what the novel’s about before I write it. Let’s just say the idea of happiness and brain function – the very things behind successful meditation – led me into a historical thriller plot that I will start researching as soon as my current project, a novel about the Italian artist Caravaggio, is completed.

What neuroscience tells us about meditation (and any neuroscientist – she knows who I mean – reading this ought to refrain from writing comments about how dumb I’ve made this sound) is that positivity rewires the brain to be yet more positive. My meditation in question proves that in a small way. I was far from positive until I began the meditation. Suddenly I was as positive as I can be – coming up with a new novel isn’t something that happens every day.

Well, actually it does happen quite frequently (for example, just now I’m thinking, “What about a mystery novel set in the Swinging Sixties in which Benny Hill is the detective”…). But those ideas don’t carry the same element of certainty that this would be the novel for me to write. I had been juggling at least five ideas for my next book. None of them had struck me as absolutely right on a deep level. Dare I say it in these cynical times, on a spiritual level. They all had something logically right about them, but they didn’t feel right.

To an extent, I owe this idea of positivity to some recent chats with Tony Buzan, author of The Mind Map Book and other volumes. We spent time together at a recent book festival in Dubai. Tony’s main point is that we only use a tiny fraction of our brain’s capacity. About 1 percent. His work is designed to enable us to increase that percentage.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Readers like to ask writers “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s such a common question at book readings that I’ve noticed writers (on blogs) making fun of people who ask it. Yet it’s rather silly to ridicule someone for asking a question most writers can’t answer themselves.

So here’s my answer: I get my best ideas by walking.

Just lately I’ve been plotting my next book, which is going to be a thriller set in Iraq and New York. I’ve done a good deal of thinking about it in my office, standing in front of my computer or slouched in my bean bag. But when I’m in front of the computer, I find myself thinking about what to write for this blog. And on the bean bag I get distracted by the little white polystyrene balls which seem endlessly to leak out of it onto my Iranian kilim.

The best ideas for this new novel have come to me as I walk home from the gym. It’s not because I’m walking through the prettiest part of town. I walk along a busy dual-carriageway linking two other noisy, busy roads. I sweat like a pig, too – I remind you that I live in Jerusalem, which is a mountainous desert town.

But all the way I’m chattering into my digital voice recorder, setting down my ideas. The reason is simple: relaxation and lack of distraction. I have nothing else to do but walk. Nowhere to go but where I’m going. Nothing to see but fast-moving traffic and a deserted sand lot. My mind is free to be creative, because it’s unhindered by anything else. (I’m quite capable of walking and doing something else at the same time, fortunately.)

In my meditation classes, I’ve sometimes practiced a walking meditation. If you pay attention to each step, the way your foot falls, you’ll soon find your mind entirely clear of any distraction. The same thing is happening on my way home from the gym.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.