Lit Salon on the epidemic of the shrinking attention span & a simple exercise for writing when you feel like a butterfly in a hurricane
Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager. ― Susan Sontag
Dear Jeannine,
I love Writing in the Dark! And I am going to try the embodied writing intensive with you this April. I really need it! But the truth is, I’m famous for starting stuff and trailing off. It seems like ever since the pandemic, I can’t stick with anything to save my life. My focus is shot to hell—I have the attention of span of a butterfly in a hurricane—and my follow-through is nonexistent.
Do you have any tips for me, or anything I can do to prepare for embodied writing? I’d like to, for once, just stick with something from start to finish and not flit away like a hyper gnat. I don’t even care what I write or whether it’s any good. I just want to complete a full experience.
Love,
Butterfly
Dear Butterfly,
First off, thank you so much for your kindness. Second, you don’t really need to do a thing to prepare. I promise. I’m glad you’re here and so excited you’re going to join us for The Visceral Self.
But since you bothered to write (thank you!), here are a couple of ideas for you. First, I’ve been sharing short essays in preparation for The Visceral Self, and you can read a few of those if you like (not at all required, though, don’t worry!).
As for your shaky attention span, you’re in great company. Lots of researchers are looking at the way attention problems are escalating and harming our mental and emotional health. Gloria Mark, a researcher at University of California, Irvine, wrote a book called Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness & Productivity, and says there’s lots of high-quality scientific evidence showing our ability to pay attention is declining rapidly:
Gloria Mark, an attention researcher at the University of California, Irvine, is author of "Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity" (Hanover Square Press). She says there is scientific evidence attention spans are getting shorter.
"We started studying attention span length over 20 years ago," Mark said. "We would shadow people with a stopwatch, and every time they shifted attention, we'd click, 'Stop' In 2003, we found that attention spans averaged about two-and-a-half minutes on any screen before people switched. In the last five, six years, they're averaging 47 seconds on a screen."
I’m not an attention researcher, but I do know of a few very effective exercises for strengthening my capacity for deep focus. That said, I know of only one that combines attention with language and is, therefore, also a simple but profoundly powerful writing practice.
Although this exercise is simple, it’s quite difficult to do it well—but when we do, we can absolutely increase our ability to initiate and sustain genuine attention and focus. One reason I love this method is that it involves no technology, no money, and almost no time—just five minutes a day. You can invest more time if you have it, but five minutes will be enough for benefits.
In my thirty years of teaching, this method has proven repeatedly to be the most effective and joyful way to learn not only to pay better attention, but to carry that attention onto the page and into our work as writers in ways that wake up the writing like nothing else can. If you give it a try, please let me know how it goes! This practice is, for me, tied with meditation and yoga for its long-term transformational effects in my life, and in my own writing.
The attention method I teach stems from Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life, which are to “pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it.”
This, I agree, is beautiful advice. The only problem is that even those of us who are actively seeking to improve our attention-paying skills tend to rush too quickly into the “telling about it” part.
Why is this a problem?
Because as soon as we are telling about something, we are no longer paying attention to it.
But what exactly does it mean to tell about it? This is an important question, because we can’t avoid something if we don’t define it. So, telling about it might mean literally speaking or writing about what astonished you, yes. But it can also simply mean thinking our way into a story, rather than sticking with paying attention to the thing itself.
Remember, as soon as we’re thinking our way into a story, we’re no longer attending. As soon as we are spinning a narrative about something, we are no longer seeing it for what it is. We are not capable of doing both things at the same time.
But what’s so wrong with thinking our way into stories? Isn’t that kind of what it means to be writers, after all? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? What we’re best at?
The answer is yes, but also no.
Because the best, truest material will always come from deep attention, which must not only begin but also remain long enough in the world around us. Again, our attention must remain long enough on something outside of ourselves for us to see through that thing like a window, as the poet Marie Howe compels us to do. When we leap too quickly into the realm of story, we effectively remove our attention from the thing itself and instead wander inward toward our own thoughts, ideas, interpretations, desires, judgments, etc.
There’s a time for all that, yes. The inner world is a crucial realm for us to explore. But, by and large, we spend too much time there. We tend to enjoy story-making and inward mental activity far better than we enjoy the quiet, disciplined act of observation. That’s why most of us must actively work at paying attention to what’s in front of us if we ever hope to get better at it.
Is it worth getting better at it? Especially if it’s so much work?
Unequivocally, yes. It is worth it.
If we consistently attend to the world, our writing will explode with a realness and a vividness we cannot achieve any other way. Too much of the writing submitted to me in my editing practice relies on abstractions and internal reflection without earning its proclamations with clear-eyed, truthful observations of the world we all share. I need precise, concrete renderings—of the world, this world, the one you and I both live in, the world I recognize—for the work on the page to leap off of it and come fully alive.
So many extraordinary artists (and scientists and other creatives) had the benefit of childhoods spent in deep, quiet attention. Beatrix Potter, for example, who went on to become not just one of the most beloved children’s authors and illustrators of all time but also an accomplished scientist and conservationist, spent her formative years paying deep attention to and sketching plants and animals:
Her pets took the place of school friends, and she spent hours observing and sketching them. This activity evolved into a love of and aptitude for natural history, science, and art. In the summers, Potter's father rented a country house in which the family vacationed for three months. During her earlier years, the Potters spent their summers in Scotland, but they began to summer in the Lake District as she grew older. On these holidays, she rambled the countryside studying plants and animals.
As Simone Weil said, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
Okay, but to answer your question: how do you pay “absolutely unmixed attention?” This is a capacity we can acquire, but only with consistent practice. When we stop practicing, our capacity weakens. In that way, deep attention is like a muscle. When it atrophies, our writing suffers, and so do we.
Ideally, a writer should exercise this muscle every day—and just five minutes will bring results. I describe the exercise I like best below. Please keep me posted!
Love,
Jeannine
The Attention Exercise
All you need to do today is start slowly (and, yes, arduously) with the clearest
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