Noodling

I played the violin in high school. Before you can play a violin, you have to tune it, which requires patience and concentration. It doesn't take long, but you can't rush it. When I experienced hypnosis later in life, it felt a little bit like tuning a violin.

You also have to put resin on the bow, which I always found very pleasurable -- the piney smell of the resin block, the velvety friction you felt as you drew the bow across it, the faint stickiness it left on your fingers.

A lot of art forms have these rituals, these bits of mindless, but pleasantly tactile, noodling that have to be done in addition to the intensely creative work.

Painters mix paints, clean brushes, stretch and prepare canvases. Calligraphers draw baseline guides before writing and erase them afterwards. Singers warm up their voices; dancers warm up their muscles. Even people who do art on computer can get that trancelike feeling while they're building perspective guides or cleaning up scans.

There must have been a time when writing had rituals like that, too -- choosing a quill and cutting it, maybe, or mixing ink, or cutting paper to size. (Things like outlining and research seem more like part of the creative work to me -- like playing scales, as opposed to resining a bow.)

Opening an AppleWorks document or clicking up a little more lead in the mechanical pencil just isn't the same.