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The habits I've established over years involving writing seems to have not only served me well in the past, but from reading the results of the research done in this Wired article, my habits may help me even more in the future. It's a brief article, take a look:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/learning-methods/
Poetry was my first attempt at writing creatively. It started with the "Roses are red..." dealio. It probably had something to do with wanting to make myself sexually attractive during my teen years. It didn't do much good, I was a virgin until I was nearly 19 years old. I didn't write any poetry I liked until I was nearing thirty.
I wrote stacks and stacks of spiral bound notebooks full of journal notes that were a little like a diary, but I made a lot of the content I wrote to make myself seem more adventuresome and manly than I really was. Every ten years I burned all the journal books I accumulated.
Over the years I've probably burned over a hundred of them. I felt like I had to get rid of what I had written in order to receive more inspiration. Most of the poems I wrote are gone. Nobody ever knew they existed then, and for all practical purposes, nobody knows now.
In the past I've written in the style I call "tossed word salad", and I didn't care whether what I wrote could be understood by competent readers. It's for sure I wasn't writing tossed word salad in order to get good grades in English literature classes. Now that I'm older I could go senile or experience dementia or get Alzheimer's disease, I might start trying to make more sense when I explain myself.
If you've been reading what I write here you should have noticed that my editing of my own writing has gotten slack. Usually through trying to correct the typos I make, I create even more typos and leave double words like and and where I literally don't see the second "and".
My brother who has authored several books suggested that I use the Speech feature in the Mac Operating System, and have it read what I've written back to me in the hope I'll recognize simple mistakes that might not sound just right during that process.
I did that on yesterdays blog entry, and it was helpful to hear it spoken as I read along. It surprised me when I discovered that I could edit parts that needed changing as the computer voice read, and my cut and paste interjections didn't interfere with the computer voice's reading in real time.
Singing the vowels frequently has messed with my voice in a good way. I keep a folder with song lyrics in it on the desktop of my computer monitor. There are the text lyrics of four popular songs from my youth I copied from the internet. I keep them handy to have some words to sing after I get warmed up from singing the vowels, as if the lyrics were some codified chant.
I don't need musical notation for these songs because I know the tunes from memory. I never had the knack of memorizing the words of pop songs. Occasionally I'll remember snatches of the words while I'm singing a cappella, but it gets tedious singing those few words I vaguely remember to the same songs over and over.
The reason I sing these familiar old songs is that I know the tune to them (but not always the words), is to sing the words as clearly as I can and as smoothly as I can manage. If I had the words memorized I could put all my effort into singing well.
I pretend I have an audience in my mind's eye, and in my imagination I don't want my pretend audience to have to guess what the lyrics are. My ideal is to sing to tell the story of the song in an interesting way. I only have one end game. Tell the stories, pass the plate.
There is no way I can know how much trouble this can be for other singers. Some, I'm sure, have a knack or a natural talent for being able to get the words to come out of their mouth in an easy way that seems practically conversational to any of the strangers in a strange land.
Fitting the individual words of the lyrics to the rhythm and meter of the tune they're meant to fit in can be a real problem for me and my pretend audience. Sometimes I pretend my pretend audience boos me if I go too far astray. This happens more often when I get slack with the timing in favor of pronouncing the words as clearly, but as casually as possible.
For some reason I remembered that my digital piano has a drum machine built in that has probably a hundred preset classical rhythms. I might do my imaginary audience a world of good if I practiced singing the lyrics of the four old songs to a fast beat orchestrated with computer-like precision. If the timing got off, then it would have to me that was out of step.
The drum beat I chose was a 16-beat jazz rhythm that required me to sing those previously garbled lyrics real fast instead of the lackadaisical way I'd been practicing them earlier. The timing of the words might have been difficult at a slower beat, but now I didn't have time to be all that picky about how they came out.
It's too soon after trying this technique for me to think about whether practicing this technique will help or hurt my chanting efforts. Singing faster and using words I hadn't memorized yet made my throat raspy. I usually steer away from strategies that cause physical pain.
My plan is to learn to do what it takes to fit the lyrics into a beat that's twice as fast as the song would normally be sung. Then, when I sing it at its designed pace maybe I'll feel like I got lots of time to get to the next word or phrase out with a little polish, and I can concentrate on telling the story with the lyrics.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
