Attention and writing: why writing makes my life better

Note: After reading Hayes’ book, I was on an idea high, and thought about a more formal essay about professional writers' place in the "attention economy" and some of my issues with how the professional writing world operates. Then every time I started writing it, I got bored. I almost scrapped it. But I said I was going to finish out this attention trilogy. And when I say I’m going to do something, I always follow through somehow or it haunts me forever. So I just kept on writing without a specific direction just to see where it took me, and my original concept turned into this one, which is completely different. I've been writing a lot lately, mostly things for myself that no one will ever read, and it feels really good. My post today will be a mostly unedited ramble about about how writing changes the way I pay attention.

I think that every skill or hobby or whatever you would call it trains your mind to pay attention to different things in your everyday life. I really like hearing about how people with really different interests from mine see the world. Like my RA in my sophomore year of college was really into music and also happened to have perfect pitch. Once a car alarm was going off and he stopped what he was saying to mention that it was F sharp or whatever (I don’t know anything about musical notes it probably wasn’t that), and I wouldn’t have paid any attention to the car alarm at all even though we were both experiencing the sound and standing in the same parking lot. I thought it was so cool that to him, the world is a sequence of musical notes.

Part of why I love writing is because I feel like the way it requires my attention to change makes my life so much more fun. By the way, when I say “writing” here, I’m referring to mostly personal writing, like personal essays and creative writing. Maybe journalistic writing a bit too. I really enjoy analytical writing and originally tried to include aspects of that in this post, but it was just too convoluted. 

Writing requires you to pay attention of the world around you. This is how you get ideas. Like knowing that I'm looking for things to write about just generally encourages me to be more curious and open to new experiences. And I think it makes me more open to letting myself be distracted by interesting or amazing things in the world. It just makes me notice and appreciate details about my everyday life more. And that makes my life so much more fun. 

Then there is going in to an experience with the intention of writing about it. In that situation, you’re encouraged to be way more present and observant than if you were to experience the thing for no reason. Like If you just walk through living room everyday to get to the front door, you don’t really notice much. Because your mind is on getting to work on time, or what you’re going to have for lunch, or whatever. 

But then if you walk through your living room to the front door with the intention of writing about your living room, it’s going to be an entirely different experience. In order to write the description of your living room, you need to come up with some details. So then you’d have to slow down time, really pay attention to your living room. The way it smells, the specific way the light filters through your window shades, the texture of the walls, memories that you’ve had there. And now your living room is this kind of interesting and maybe even beautiful place.

Or you could decide you’re going to write about walking through your living room to the front door, but this time you're going to focus on the internal experience of it. So then maybe you would pay attention to those worried thoughts of getting to work on time, and the excited feeling about going to your favorite bagel place for lunch with your favorite coworker. And then by paying attention to those thoughts, maybe you would notice things about yourself and your emotions that you normally wouldn’t. That you’re stressed, that you’re too caught up in routine, that you really value the friendship of your coworker, or that you secretly hate your coworker but they have good restaurant recs, anything at all.

The latter kind is really helpful to me mentally. Writing is like pouring out all your thoughts on a table and getting to sort through them and put them in different orders. I feel like everyone has something they do to stay sane. For me, it's writing. I have to write. I don’t care if anyone ever sees it or not, or if it’s any “good” or not. If I don’t write, I get foggy and restless. It just helps me process my thoughts,

I think in recent years, creative writing specifically has made me give more attention to my emotions. I’ve never been a very emotionally open person. I’m naturally pretty private when it comes to my thoughts and feelings, and I really don’t like feeling vulnerable.

But writing creatively kind of forces you to feel your emotions and translate them into story. Anytime I try to write anything devoid of emotions that I personally am feeling or have experienced feeling, it’s just not convincing. 

In college, I took a poetry analysis class that had some writing assignments in the syllabus. I've never really been into poetry, so I thought it would be a good challenge to expose myself to it. The poems my professor picked were great. And a lot of them weren’t what I would usually think of as “poetry,” they were often song lyrics, or experimental poems that didn’t rhyme. My favorites were poems from "I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On" and "Having a Coke with You" by Frank O'Hara. The one by O'Hara is my favorite poem I've ever read.

Anyway, For our writing assignments, you really couldn’t hide. Even if you were kind of writing about yourself in screenwriting or prose classes, you could at least pretend to yourself and others that you weren’t. And in English literature and essay composition classes, it was all about your ideas, not yourself.

But the assumption in that poetry class was that your poem was about you. And the things you write about in poetry are feelings. So it was really uncomfortable for me to actually pay attention to what I was feeling without intellectualizing, ignoring, or justifying them, and then writing them down. I haven’t written or read much poetry ever since and don’t plan on it, but I think that experience helped my narrative writing a lot. It was helpful in a personal sense too, I think, to let myself feel my feelings as they are. One of my writing professors often mentioned that a lot of writing lessons double as life lessons. And I do genuinely think that creative writing specifically has forced me to be a more emotionally available and open person than I naturally would be.

I think another benefit to writing is the requirement to pay attention in the most literal sense: to sit down in front of a blank doc on your computer for an hour and write. I actually definitely don't think I'd be as concerned with protecting my attention span if I didn't feel the need to conserve it for writing. I've actually always had a hard time concentrating in general, so I'm very concerned about anything that threatens my already kind of fragile attention span. There are many skills and activities that requires concentration, but I feel like writing is especially challenging because there aren't many external sensory inputs like art or a sport if that makes sense. Like the fun part is all in your head, the actually physical process of it is just sitting quietly and staring at a screen or a sheet of paper.

I wish that more people wrote, and wrote casually. I feel like most people are either super into writing or don't write at all. I think more people should be encouraged to write casually, like drawing or playing music casually. Writing isn't for everyone and that is totally fine, but I think there are a lot of people who would find it helpful and fun if they tried it. Like journaling or writing stories.

I've always been kind of weird about telling people I like to write, especially write creatively for some reason. It just feels kind of personal. I don't think it should though. It became hard to hide once I studied writing in college and had to explain my degree to people.

I've had a lot of experiences where someone hears that I like to write, and they get super excited. They tell me they have a great idea for a story that I should write. It's a pitch for a workplace comedy like 70% of the time. They'll tell me about all of the quirky characters they work with, and about the specific conflicts that come up in their sector of business, and office drama. Other times it'll be stories from their childhood or a family member they always looked up to that could be a subject for a great novel. And I always tell them that they should write their own workplace comedy or personal story. They clearly pay a lot of attention to their memories or the social atmosphere of their workplace, and would probably have fun writing them down. Usually they insist that they can't, because it wouldn't be any good.

I feel like we need to get away from the idea that writing is only valuable if it's "good" and if it's published. I think that the actual attentive and reflective process of it is just as important, at least it is to me.