Paying attention to the world around you
Many writers emphasise the importance of paying attention, and how crucial it is for crafting stories, whether fiction or non-fiction. They talk about being open to the wider world, noticing things, observing what’s happening around you, using all the senses to tune in. Susan Sontag says ‘It’s all about paying attention. It’s all about taking in as much of what’s out there as you can.’ There will be an urge to connect, to understand, to make sense of what is observed, but as Amanda Patterson writes, ‘When you pay attention, you do not judge or criticise. Paying attention is not critical. It is neutral.’ This is paying attention as a means of fuelling the intellect and your creative juices, to generate ideas, thoughts, feelings.
Paying attention to the story
Then there is the attention needed to turn these ideas, thoughts and feelings into a formed story that carries a reader from beginning to end. There’s a lot to consider and you will need to be attentive to big picture issues such as theme, plot and character arcs to shape a satisfying story. Along the way of drafting and redrafting a manuscript to refine the story design (see my blog on story design), it can be a struggle to sustain the required high level of attention to the work. That’s when it’s a good idea to take a break and get some distance from it all. You are likely to need to refresh your capacity to pay attention because you’ll need buck loads of it when it comes to the close focus detail at a sentence level, determining word choice, syntax and stylistic considerations.
Paying attention to the writing on the page
I can tell a lot about where a writer is at in terms of their levels of attention from the work itself. I am often reading manuscripts at an early stage of development and so am not expecting them to be highly polished or necessarily ‘clean’ (a term referring to copy that is free of errors). However, if the draft is scattered with typographical errors, I can sense the writer has run out of steam to check through the material before sending it on for review. Technically, that’s not a huge issue in terms of my ability to assess the overall strength of the story, yet spelling and grammatical errors can be distracting and too many of them can get in the way of taking in the story. Making sure your work is as error free as possible – paying attention at a sentence level – shows a professional reader that you care. Don’t underestimate how important this is.
Paying attention to guidelines and instructions
An often overlooked aspect of paying attention relates to guidelines and instructions given to writers about submitting work, whether that be to an editor for assessment, to a competition, to an agent or publisher, to a development program or a funding body. While I get that not everyone relishes the nitty gritty level of detail that an editor might (we are a strange breed who celebrate pedantry), I cannot over emphasise the importance of writers strictly following guidelines and instructions, whether that concerns formatting, word count, information requested, or types of documents required.
Yes, this is the mundane end of paying attention, but in some ways it may be the most important. When writers are submitting work to me for assessment, I send a dot point list of requirements including formatting guidelines, what to send, where to send it, how to bind the manuscript, etc. A surprising number of writers overlook something on that list, or pay attention to the list, but not the rest of the email that may include other important details. Sometimes that requires further to-ing and fro-ing on my part, which is okay at an assessment stage, but could mean the rejection of a submission at another level.
In the competitive world of publishing, you must pay close attention to all the details. If you submit an 800 word synopsis when a 500 word one is requested, or you spiral bind the manuscript when loose leaf is requested, for example, you are advertising the fact that you haven’t paid attention. And if you haven’t paid attention to these simple details, what else haven’t you paid attention to? It could well be enough to rule out your submission altogether.
Overriding selective attention
Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene notes that paying attention necessarily involves choosing what to ignore: ‘To direct attention is to choose, filter, and select: this is why cognitive scientists speak of selective attention. This form of attention amplifies the signal which is selected, but it also dramatically reduces those that are deemed irrelevant.’ The key takeaway here is that as writers you need to override selective attention when it comes to the details of submitting work and not assume that any single guideline or instruction is irrelevant.
In some ways this brings us full circle back to the idea of paying attention to as much as you can of the world around you. This includes the dull, the commonplace, the everyday and the routine. Perhaps the artistry of paying attention as a writer comes down to the mundane, the seemingly irrelevant. Remember this when you are next faced with a list of submission protocols!
References
Susan Sontag: lithub.com/susan-sontag-on-being-a-writer-you-have-to-be-obsessed/
Amanda Patterson: www.writerswrite.co.za/pay-attention-if-youre-a-writer/
Stanislas Dehaene: lithub.com/how-we-pay-attention-changes-the-very-shape-of-our-brains/
