How Do We Focus?

Writing is hard. Melville felt it too.

I have hunted for the elusive focus that is required for excellence. I can never think clearly enough for my writing. Never carve enough time to drop in deep enough. I blame the phone of course. I blame my internet connection. I blame my group chats and my inability to say no. I blame working at home and needing an office.

And I lionize the past. I assume that Faulkner could sit and focus forever. Melville could write without ceasing.

Well, I was reading Melville’s old letters this week and came upon this, from a letter to his friend and obsession, Nathaniel Hawthorne. He’s writing about writing Moby Dick:

“In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my "Whale" while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now,—I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,-that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me,—I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.” - HM, June 1851.

Nothing is new under that burning orb. The ways in which we are distracted today may be new-ish, but in truth they are remixes of the classic forever distractions. Pop-ins from a friend. The news from town. The news of the world. Gossip. Laughter. Hunger. Lust. The devil holding the door ajar.

This should certainly encourage you. We’ve always been distracted, and somehow finding occasional excellence in spite of it.

Whenever I have a friend that is taking their stab at writing a book, or a screenplay, they tell me ‘how in the heck do you do this?’ What they mean is how do you write something so long? How can it all come together? How can it be coherent? How can you focus long enough for this to make any sense?

There is no such thing as ‘writing a book.’ There is only ‘write this scene.’ There is only writing a page. Write the moment where your friend broke up with you. Write that conversation today. Write the scene where you cried in the bathroom. Write the day your dad died, hour by hour.

When I wrote To Shake The Sleeping Self (my book about riding a bicycle from Oregon to Patagonia over 16 months), my dad, also an author, gave me great advice: ‘Just pick five characters that stand out. Pay attention to the stories you tell over the next few months about your trip. Those are the ones you should write. People can’t remember 16 months of daily stories. They’ll remember five. So give them the best five stories you’ve got.’

Once you write your five stories, sew them together, bit by bit. And you’ll have a book.

Good luck cuties,

Jed.