On attention

to remedy the creative stall

Too many creative people I know have had difficulty concentrating in the last few years, especially when it comes to reading and capturing their own stories on the page. These are people who love literature, and who recognize the power of storytelling to drive human connection and compassion. They know the value, yet they feel helpless to busyness.

Everyone contends with distractions, of course, but I wonder whether highly creative people are even more susceptible due to their curiosity about the world.

When I coach writers, many say they are simply unable to focus because there’s too much going on, so I offer exercises and often invite a writer to work with me in real-time. We write and sometimes read together. We make lists. We look at their topic through a narrower or broader lens.

If you can relate to this creative struggle, and you have a minute (quite literally) and access to a clockface in your home or here, let’s experiment. See if you can watch the second hand for a full rotation without breaking your gaze or clicking something else. If such an exercise is too hard, try again later or start with 30 seconds, or even 15, and see if you fare better.

Despite a distracting world, we can rebuild our stamina, and it’s remarkable how a single minute (or less) can ground us. I share this because creatives need to be ready to rebuild our ability to do the thing we love in a way tech cannot.

It’s common to joke about our lowered attention spans. So many have trouble focusing enough to read or connect with friends over lunch without looking at their phones a dozen or more times. Still, the truth is that we’re missing out on more than our distracted minds allow us to imagine.

Long before the collective love affair with mobile devices, AI, and auto-correct/suggest, I was ahead of the game. I had a wildly distracted mind. I had trouble reading and focusing, and my mind would wander with the same velocity as the most annoying pop-up ad.

Those who have felt anxiety can relate. Anxious states of mind call us toward distraction even during the most mundane or unthreatening of circumstances. Over the years, I’ve come to correlate anxiety with creative energy because my anxiety always felt like creativity that ran amok.

Perhaps that’s why my writing was always described as “dark” when I started publishing (case in point).

When we have no channel, creative energy builds and can combine with negative stimuli to create pretty vivid pictures. This is why writing has been so pivotal in my human journey so far, at least from a developmental perspective. It helped me to reign in a distracted mind.

Alongside this personal realization came tech and more tech and layered tech, and I realized that while I no longer suffer from anxiety (long story — I’ll tell it sometime), save for a few acute examples, I do have the same sense of distraction and misuse of energy when I am on social media for too long or clicking news story after news story to try to figure out all the angles on an issue.

This simple clock-face practice is one that I like because it doesn’t feel as ritualized or time-consuming as sitting to meditate the way I might at the end of the day. Simply watching the clock for a minute at work or amidst whatever distracting things are happening in the world can truly slow the mind enough that we can pivot to a more creative and generative mind state.

And this is what leads to writing. If there’s time, if we make time, writing is the panacea. Yep, I said it. It’s alchemy and science and has been empirically evaluated by many. Not just me. Stories alter our world, and we must share them.

Sure, we might have to work through a bit of distraction (see clockface exercise above) to find the solidity to write or read, but when we do, I think it might be more valuable than it’s ever been.

You write in order to change the world … if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it. —James Baldwin

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