On creative focus & week 31 of 52

homing in to better understand it all

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.” —Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

A tiny bit.

There is nothing like the struggle to recreate a bowl of fruit with heavy oil paints as part of a community center art class in Newark, Ohio. After twenty minutes, I started watching the clock. Every additional paint stroke made my situation worse.

Even though I come from a family of artists, I never found myself naturally inclined to draw or paint anything that resembled reality. I’d occasionally have fun throwing paint on canvas in various patterns and positions to see what would happen. Still, when trying to recreate something intricate like a human hand or a fruit bowl, I usually just found myself frustrated.

I felt the same sense of defeat creeping up at this art class/date with my husband. My apple looked like a deflated dog toy. My bowl was too big, and my background was all odd angles and uneven lines.

The teacher, who I hadn’t thought much of, said, “Jen, here, let me show you something.” She told me to cut a small hole in the middle of a piece of paper. She then asked me to look through that tiny hole and recreate what I saw. Move it slightly, she said, and repeat.

In other words, she helped me to focus. It was a seminal moment.

When attempting to recreate or fully understand what I saw, I was too busy looking at the big picture (a proclivity for many writers) and trying to process all aspects of an image at once.

This habit has shown up in my writing as well. And it seems to be a crippling force that arrives with the onslaught of information constantly coming at us from our online haunts. We micro-dose news and trade pseudo-psychological diagnoses with social media friends. We worry over political decisions and wars.

When we sit down to write—or do anything some days—it’s easy to feel the head spin to the point of intellectual dizziness. We’re overwhelmed by noise, and we might benefit more than we can imagine by doing something as simple as narrowing input and looking at one aspect at a time.

AYTL exercise: Close your eyes for a few seconds and take a deep breath while you tune in to the sounds around you. When you open your eyes again, focus on one thing—whatever is right in front of you. Do this once daily, and see if it helps slow down your mind. If you’re like me, consider doing the digital version by keeping only one tab open at a time (*gasp*, I know).

Writing exercise: Revise an older piece of fiction or an older poem by taking one line and expanding it into a piece of its own.