How do you write your stuff? Not technically, but in what environment? I like to write alone, on my PC, full sized keyboard, with talk radio in the background. Some like a musical background to relax or enthuse them, but I find that if I like the music I willlisten to it instead of writing, and if I don’t like the music I’ll wonder what I’m doing, listening alone to mucic I don’t like.
So it’s talk radio for me. Mainly LBC. The presenters can drone along in the background, with me sometimes listening for a minute or two between paragraphs or inspiration, and then getting back to the writing. Hearing snatches of the radio news means I’m mixed up about current affairs – I gather we did surprisingly well in the Brexit World Cup, And Donald Trump is President of Scotland’s Golf Course – but I’m racing ahead with my latest book, and that’s the main thing.
Or that’s how it used to be. Radio has hit a snag. The beauty of radio, and why it beats television all ends up when used as background noise, is that the listener doesn’t have to look at it. We needn’t use our eyes, leaving them free for other uses. We can write, exercise, do housework I’m told, cook, eat or just about anything that doesn’t make too much noise, while half-listening to the pleasant drawl of the radio presenters. No longer, and the villain is social media, especially Twitter.
I don’t mean the time we waste checking our Facebook/Instagram/BigTalk/LinkedIn threads and keeping up with the latest hashtags. That’s our own fault and the solution is in our hands. Simply offend the Twittersphere – easily done, just say we believe in something – so we don’t dare ever use social media again. Or be boring and use willpower, in case we need social media later to promote our work.
No, I mean how Twitter has ruined the radio. How? Simple. You can’t half listen to LBC and the rest for more than ten minutes without the presenter mentioning Twitter and asking us to check the latest trending story. To check Twitter we obviously need a screen, which means we have to use our eyes.
Radio presenters are aware that radio is an ancient medium, so last century, and seek to compensate by pretending they are down with the kids and up on the latest hashtag. To prove it, they constantly refer to new tweets, forcing their listeners to stop what they’re doing to look at the social media screen. What’s that? We can ignore them? But we can’t, any more than we can refuse another cashew nut. Once we’re told something interesting is only a tweet away, we must leave our characters hanging while we find out just what @Fred123 has to say about today’s news. One day Fred will tweet something interesting and by Zeus, we want to be there when it happens.
Well enough’s enough. If presenters want to commit radio hari kari that’s their lookout. I’ve found the solution. Foreign language radio. From now on I shall write my stuff to the comforting background of French Radio. Hope it doesn’t effect my characters…
(P.S. I made up the BigTalk one.)
