3 Thoughts on Attention for Aspiring Writers

reflections

It is a wearying thing for the soul to attend to pain, to wrong things, to a cursed and thorny ground. It is a wearying to be split and pulled, to have your attention called here and there. It is wearying to to live and work in a world like ours. How do you rest? 

Do not throw yourself upon the broken ground and lie there. Do not throw you attention to the wind and watch it scatter over a hundred posts and tweets and push-notifications. Do not starve your attention. You have enough of that already. 

Rest well: Feast your attention on what is beautiful. Drive for a long time until you can look for your windshield and see, not a route, but trees and asphalt and sunlight. Sit in a coffee shop until the customers disappear and you see humans in their places—humans with breath in their nostrils and blood in their hearts and shoes on their feet. Attend to them. 

Then, when you have at long last grounded yourself, when you can feel your breath and the chair you’re sitting in, when you appetite is awake, feast your attention on whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable. If anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. When your rest is full, write what you have attended to. 

Writing is a matter of attention. Writers watch the world, they tend it in season and out of season, and then, they say it back. In light of this, these are three thoughts I've gathered on the topic of attention. 

1. Rest is a feast of attention. 

2. How do you make “attention” a verb? 

How do you make “attention” a verb? I mean you, personally. You could, if you chose, “pay attention” to a person or a thing. If you choose your person or think profitably, what you get will be worth the attention you have paid. Or, if something is bothersome, it make take or even steak your attention. That is why they will tell you not to waste your attention. Spend it wisely. Do you see how, if you “pay” attention, your life will be buying and selling, budgeting your moments, and keeping your thoughts in a checkbook? 

There is another way to make attention a verb. You can choose to “attend” to the world. That would make you, of course, an attendant, a servant. Your days would be given to waiting upon whatever it is to which you have pledged your service. Beware of this road. The one who attends does not belong to himself. 

But in a world of checkbooks, where life is measured out in coffee spoons, I believe it is sweet to lay myself aside and don the attendant’s livery, to take orders from the flowers, to wait upon books, to heed the faces and voices and eyes of the souls who live beside me. 

So, how do you make “attention” a verb? 

3. Attention is Tending Toward

To attend to a thing is to tend toward it—at least, that is what the etymology suggests. “Attend,” “extend,” “tend,” “tendril,”—all of these words share a root. 

I cannot attend to a thing from a neutral position. I will move toward it. When I was sixteen, as I learned to drive, someone told me that the car would follow my eyes, which is why I had to keep my eyes on the road. I have never forgotten that, probably because I live in Ohio now, and I seldom take the advice. 

My drives cary me between cornfields and soybean fields, between pretty white farmhouses and big old barns, caught in the act of tumbling town, still humming with the ghosts of old stories and old lives lived well. I can’t help but watch them as I drive, and I’m constantly hearing the beep of my car telling me to stay between the lines, to keep my eyes on the road. 

Isn’t it interesting that “tend” can have the sense of moving toward a thing, and also of service, just like “attend”? 

I hope I am the type of person that tends and attends to the place where I live. I don’t like to always be looking ahead to my destination, even if it is safer. Even in the split-second glances as I whir down the road, I want my eyes on beautiful things. It’s not only the car that follows the eyes—it’s the heart, too.