Focus

Focus is everything. As a writer, you already know this on some level. You can’t write about romance and focus on war. You can’t write your memoir about growing up in Alabama in the 70’s if you focus on what you need to buy for tonight’s dinner. Sounds obvious, I know, but every time you sit down to write you practice training your attention in one specific direction. You may not know what will come from that focus. In fact, you are often surprised, and glad for it. The surprise is the fun. But before you receive inspiration, before you get an idea you can turn into your next scene, you must focus.

Although we’re almost always focusing on something. Like a camera whose lens is exposed, we’re always training our attention somewhere. We train it on our phones, our partner, our upcoming trip, that remodel we’d like to start. Often it wanders around until it lights on something bothersome. Maybe it will land somewhere interesting, but drifting untethered it seems to find what it considers problems first. They’re easiest to see. They’re no fun, but there they are. Better keep focusing on them or they won’t go away.

Whenever I reread my work, I always ask the same question over and over: Do I like this? Do I like this? Do I like this? If the answer is, “No,” I have found what you could call a problem. It doesn’t feel like those other problems I notice when I’m not writing. Well, it used to. I thought it looked like failure. Now, on most days, it looks like an opportunity to answer the question, “What would satisfy me?” That’s a question I like answering, even if the answer doesn’t come immediately.

It takes discipline to view my work this way, and that discipline begins with my focus. It must stay on my inner light of curiosity and not drift into notions of getting something right. I don’t know how to do that, but I do know how to follow what interests me. That light keeps moving, however, and to follow I must stay trained upon it, not worrying where it’s taking me, or what people think of what it asks me to write, just focusing on its bright direction as a flower follows the sun.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com