Absolute Attention is Prayer

Marie Howe says, "This might be the most difficult task ... in postmodern life …to look long enough so that we can look through it—like a window." A writing exercise to help get you there.

Two years ago I assembled—as a free gift to this community—a list of Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I’ve learned about writing from reviewing thousands of manuscripts. Based on your wild enthusiasm (far beyond my expectations!) for that post, I’ve chosen to build on one of those eleven points for this writing exercise. The result being an actionable, step-by-step writing exercise for you based on the point of craft in my essay that drew the most feedback and praise, as well as admissions of ongoing challenge: “Showing vs. Telling” (number four on the list, which—oddly for an essay I billed as a numbered list—I did not number).

Showing is all about paying attention, which is the number one most important thing we do as writers. But even if I had numbered the list, it’s not that simple. Is anything ever that simple?

You see, I only placed showing vs. telling fourth of eleven because the three items before it (“Attention,” “Internal vs. External,” and “More on External Observation”) were foundational to the things I wanted to say about showing vs. telling. So if you haven’t read the Eleven Urgent Things and want to, now is a great time, but you can also just dive in with us here. That works, too!

Either way, to set the stage for this archival writing exercise, we’ll take a minute to explore attention, because attention is the non-negotiable prerequisite to good writing. If we don’t know how to pay attention, we can’t hope to show the world to anyone in such a way that it becomes “more than the lived life” as fiction writer Joy Williams declares it should in her stunning essay, “Uncanny Singing That Comes from Certain Husks,” published in the 1998 anthology Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction:

The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life. The work — this Other, this other thing — this false life that is even less than the seeming of this lived life, is more than the lived life, too. It is so unreal, so precise, so unsurprising, so alarming, really. 

Many other writers have also waxed poetic on attention’s virtues. May Sarton, in her Journals of a Solitude, wrote the following:

Simone Weil says, ‘Absolute attention is prayer.’ And the more I thought about this over the years, the truer it is to me. I have used the sentence often in talking about poetry to students, to suggest that if one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like revelation takes place. Something is ‘given,’ and perhaps that something is always a reality outside the self. We are aware of God only when we cease to be aware of ourselves, not in the negative sense of denying the self, but in the sense of losing the self in admiration and joy.”

The beautiful poet Marie Howe talks about attention, too—and the necessity of being able to observe and describe things as they are, without pushing into interpretation, story, or metaphor-making. Howe said, in an interview with Krista Tippet in 2013, that “this might be the most difficult task for us in postmodern life: not to look away from what is actually happening. To put down the iPod and the e-mail and the phone. To look long enough so that we can look through it—like a window.” Here’s how Howe teaches this to her students at Sarah Lawrence, a process she also described in the aforementioned interview, which aired (and was published as a transcript) on On Being:

Ms. Howe: It hurts to be present, though. I ask my students every week to write 10 observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them.

Ms. Tippett: Really?

Ms. Howe: They really find it hard.

Ms. Tippett: What do you mean? What is the assignment? 10 observations of their actual world?

Ms. Howe: Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.

Ms. Tippett: It does.

Ms. Howe: It hurts us.

Ms. Tippett: You naming something.

Ms. Howe: We want to say, “It was like this; it was like that.” We want to look away. And to be with a glass of water or to be with anything — and then they say, “Well, there’s nothing important enough.” And that’s whole thing. It’s the point.

Ms. Howe: It’s the this, right?

Ms. Howe: Right, the this, whatever. And then they say, “Oh, I saw a lot of people who really want” — and, “No, no, no. No abstractions, no interpretations.” But then this amazing thing happens, Krista. The fourth week or so, they come in and clinkety, clank, clank, clank, onto the table pours all this stuff. And it so thrilling. I mean, it is thrilling. Everybody can feel it. Everyone is just like, “Wow.” The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trashcan closing, and the maple tree outside, and the blue jay. I mean, it almost comes clanking into the room. And it’s just amazing.

Ms. Tippett: In some basic level, what they’ve done is just engage with their senses.

Ms. Howe: Yeah, and have been present out of their minds and just noticing what’s around them, which is — we don’t do. And again, not to compare it to anything. They’re not allowed. And that’s very hard for them. And then on the fifth or sixth week, I say, “OK, use metaphors.” And they don’t want to. They don’t know how. They’re like, “Why would I? Why would I compare that to anything when it’s itself?” Exactly. Good question. So then you think, why the necessity of a metaphor? Why do you have to use a metaphor now? Not just to do it to avoid it, but to do it to make it more there. And it’s very interesting.

One last example (for now) of paying attention to the thing itself, the power of the thing itself.

It happened during my last MFA residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts, with the brilliant Richard McCann leading workshop. Richard was trying to teach our group about overstretched metaphors and how to avoid them. As an example, he referred to a poem by Pablo Neruda, in which Neruda compares the blood of children in the streets to something. “What might you compare the blood of children to?” Richard wanted to know. And around the table—there were maybe nine or ten of us in that workshop—pens scratched on paper. What would we compare it to? Richard was waiting. Finally someone went first and soon ideas were floating across the table, some tentative, others bolder. Maybe red wine? Earth? Tear stains? Death? My own thinking was going in a different direction, and, as is sometimes the case, that made me feel a little anxious about breaking from the group. But I also felt sure. So when my turn came, I said that I was thinking I might compare the blood of children to … the blood of children. As it turns out, that is precisely what Neruda did in his poem, “I’m Explaining a Few Things.” Neruda’s line is:

Bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

I share this example and think of it often because I learned so much from that experience, and from Richard in general. Importantly, I learned the importance of listening to my instincts. Instincts are powerful currency in our creative practice. We can’t trust them completely though—we have to test them. We have to stay curious.

But if we aren’t paying deep, continuous attention, we may not even know what our instincts are! I also learned or relearned that the thing itself—paying attention to and revealing the truth of the thing itself—can be vastly more powerful than any fancy footwork with constructed metaphor (by this I mean metaphors we make vs. the ones that emerge organically if we attend closely enough to real things), or acrobatic language. There is nothing more like the blood of children than “without fuss, children’s blood.” Neruda understood that and we can learn from his understanding.

With all this said, this writing exercise will begin with meticulous attention and reporting, followed by a brief but potent bit of telling. Here’s how to work your way through it, step by step (along with two extraordinary examples).

Writing Exercise: Absolute Attention is Prayer

Begin by observing something in the external world as closely and precisely as humanly possible. Just the thing itself. This thing should not be you. It should also not be an action you are taking or a sensation you are feeling. Step away from the self for the first part of this exercise. Choose something outside of yourself—an object, plant, animal, process (i.e., water flowing down the outside of a window), etc. In fact, I like to start with several options, just in case my first or second or third choice becomes too unbearable or won’t open like a window, the way Howe promises. Once you’ve settled on something to observe, something that sparks with potential, that crackles a little, then hunker down and give this