Do you still know the sound of silence? I mean the sound when you don’t hear traffic, voices or music. It’s the sound you hear when you are not wearing a headphone, when there is no TV playing, away from traffic and people.
Working in the music business, I have music around me all day. I wake up with classical music from the alarm clock. At breakfast I listen to the radio. In the bathroom I’m making too much noise splashing with water. On the way to/from the office I’m in traffic, at the office I’ll listen to music again. At home I listen to TV or music until I go to bed. Suddenly I can hear all the thoughts that I couldn’t hear during the day.
When writers want to become more creative, they have to listen to their inner voice, to the story that’s already inside them. An often heard advise, also from J. Cameron is to stay absent from reading for a whole week! Letters for writers are around you just like music for musicians. It’s hard to avoid them for one day, so what to day about a week! If you want to hear your inner melody, you have to search for silence.
At the office now, without any music, I hear a blackbird singing in the courtyard. What a beautiful melody! I hear the ventilation of the server running and the clock ticking. I hear the keyboard while writing. And with the window open, I can almost hear the new leaves stretching on the tree in front of the window. When I look at the picture, I’m still silent but I can feel a loud giggle inside me 🙂
For me it still seems impossible to do a whole week without listening to music or without reading. Still, it becomes more and more clear to me that in order to hear my own melody I have to search for silence.