Jeremiah Tolbert

I know I am not the only writer who finds that inpira­tion oftens strikes in the bath. I’ve had a num­ber of con­ver­sa­tions with fel­low writ­ers about how strange it seems that some of our best ideas come to us at that moment. I can think of a cou­ple of the­o­ries as to why this happens:

• The time of the day that you shower is par­tic­u­larly con­du­sive to cre­ative think­ing. I shower first thing in the morn­ing, and I know my cre­ative brain is a lit­tle bit stronger when the ana­lyt­i­cal brain is still swip­ing away the pre­vi­ous night’s cob­webs and puz­zling over what the hell those rab­bits on stilts were doing in that last dream.
• The white noise sound gen­er­ated by the shower puts us into a par­tic­u­lar brain wave state or something.
• The absence of dis­trac­tion from elec­tron­ics and media and every­thing allows us to actu­ally think freely. Personally, it is the only time in the day that I am not inter­act­ing with some kind of elec­tronic device. If I’m not on the com­puter, I’m watch­ing TV, or read­ing a book, and my iPhone is never more than a reach away. Basically, dis­trac­tions abound.

It is hard to say which of these three aspects are most directly respon­si­ble for that cre­ative burst, so I am going to try and recre­ate the expe­ri­ence with a few mod­i­fi­ca­tions to make it eas­ier to actu­ally cap­ture the ideas that come from it. One of the biggest prob­lems i have with hav­ing inspiri­a­tion then is that I can’t remem­ber it long enough to get it down on the com­puter or paper. Someone sug­gested putting in some kind of mark­ers or bath­room crayons in the tub so that you can write it out on the wall, but as I rent, I don’t want to deal with any poten­tial dis­as­ters there. So:

1. Roll out of bed first thing and into the office. Turn on a white noise gen­er­at­ing pro­gram, or a long record­ing of rain.
2. Turn off the inter­net con­nec­tion. Load up a full screen wordprocessor
3. See what happens.

I will be attempt­ing this exper­i­ment in the next cou­ple of weeks, and will report back when I’ve gath­ered enough data to deter­mine whether it’s help­ful. If you want to join in, please do so. More peo­ple attempt­ing to do this could result in a bet­ter per­spec­tive on the phenomenon.

Photo by Flickr user Turyddu