Writing Prompt: Absolute Attention is Prayer
Earlier this month I assembled—as a free gift to this community—a list of eleven urgent things I’ve learned about writing from reviewing thousands of manuscripts. Based on your wild enthusiasm (far beyond my expectations!) for that post, I’ve chosen to build on one of those eleven points for this week’s writing prompt. The result being an actionable, step-by-step writing exercise for you based on the point of craft in my essay that drew the most feedback and praise, as well as admissions of ongoing challenge: “Showing vs. Telling” (number four on the list, which—oddly for an essay I billed as a numbered list—I did not number).
Even if I had numbered the list, it’s not that simple. Is anything ever that simple? You see, I only placed showing vs. telling fourth of eleven because the three items before it (“Attention,” “Internal vs. External,” and “More on External Observation”) were foundational to the things I wanted to say about showing vs. telling. Therefore, if you haven’t read the Eleven Urgent Things post, you may want to do so before diving into this exercise.
Now, I want to set the stage for this week’s writing exercise by first exploring attention, because attention is the non-negotiable prerequisite to good writing. If we don’t know how to pay attention, we can’t hope to show the world to anyone in such a way that it becomes “more than the lived life” as fiction writer Joy Williams declares it should in her stunning essay, “Uncanny Singing That Comes from Certain Husks,” published in the 1998 anthology Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction:
The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life. The work — this Other, this other thing — this false life that is even less than the seeming of this lived life, is more than the lived life, too. It is so unreal, so precise, so unsurprising, so alarming, really.
Many other writers have also waxed poetic on attention’s virtues. May Sarton, in her Journals of a Solitude, wrote the following:
Simone Weil says, ‘Absolute attention is prayer.’ And the more I thought about this over the years, the truer it is to me. I have used the sentence often in talking about poetry to students, to suggest that if one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like revelation takes place. Something is ‘given,’ and perhaps that something is always a reality outside the self. We are aware of God only when we cease to be aware of ourselves, not in the negative sense of denying the self, but in the sense of losing the self in admiration and joy.”
Esteemed poet Marie Howe talks about attention, too—and the necessity of being able to observe and describe things as they are, without pushing into interpretation, story, or metaphor-making. Howe said, in an interview with Krista Tippet in 2013, that “this might be the most difficult task for us in postmodern life: not to look away from what is actually happening. To put down the iPod and the e-mail and the phone. To look long enough so that we can look through it—like a window.” Here’s how Howe teaches this to her students at Sarah Lawrence, a process she also described in the aforementioned interview, which aired (and was published as a transcript) on On Being:
Ms. Howe: It hurts to be present, though. I ask my students every week to write 10 observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them.
Ms. Tippett: Really?
Ms. Howe: They really find it hard.
Ms. Tippett: What do you mean? What is the assignment? 10 observations of their actual world?
Ms. Howe: Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.
Ms. Tippett: It does.
Ms. Howe: It hurts us.
Ms. Tippett: You naming something.
Ms. Howe: We want to say, “It was like this; it was like that.” We want to look away. And to be with a glass of water or to be with anything — and then they say, “Well, there’s nothing important enough.” And that’s whole thing. It’s the point.
Ms. Howe: It’s the this, right?
Ms. Howe: Right, the this, whatever. And then they say, “Oh, I saw a lot of people who really want” — and, “No, no, no. No abstractions, no interpretations.” But then this amazing thing happens, Krista. The fourth week or so, they come in and clinkety, clank, clank, clank, onto the table pours all this stuff. And it so thrilling. I mean, it is thrilling. Everybody can feel it. Everyone is just like, “Wow.” The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trashcan closing, and the maple tree outside, and the blue jay. I mean, it almost comes clanking into the room. And it’s just amazing.
Ms. Tippett: In some basic level, what they’ve done is just engage with their senses.
Ms. Howe: Yeah, and have been present out of their minds and just noticing what’s around them, which is — we don’t do. And again, not to compare it to anything. They’re not allowed. And that’s very hard for them. And then on the fifth or sixth week, I say, “OK, use metaphors.” And they don’t want to. They don’t know how. They’re like, “Why would I? Why would I compare that to anything when it’s itself?” Exactly. Good question. So then you think, why the necessity of a metaphor? Why do you have to use a metaphor now? Not just to do it to avoid it, but to do it to make it more there. And it’s very interesting.
One last example (for now) of paying attention to the thing itself, the power of the thing itself. It happened during my last MFA residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts, with the brilliant Richard McCann leading workshop. Richard was trying to teach our group about overstretched metaphors and how to avoid them. As an example, he referred to a poem by Pablo Neruda, in which Neruda compares the blood of children in the streets to something. “What might you compare the blood of children to?” Richard wanted to know. And around the table—there were maybe nine or ten of us in that workshop—pens scratched on paper. What would we compare it to? Richard was waiting. Finally someone went first and soon ideas were floating across the table, some tentative, others bolder. Maybe red wine? Earth? Tear stains? Death? My own thinking was going in a different direction, and, as is sometimes the case, that made me feel a little anxious about breaking from the group. But I also felt sure. So when my turn came, I said that I was thinking I might compare the blood of children to … the blood of children. As it turns out, that is precisely what Neruda did in his poem, “I’m Explaining a Few Things.” Neruda’s line is:
Bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
I share this example not just to show off (I got it right!), but because I learned so much from that experience, and from Richard in general. Most of all, I learned the importance of listening to my instincts. Our instincts are powerful currency in our creative practice. We can’t trust them completely—we have to test them. We have to stay curious. But if we aren’t paying deep, continuous attention, we may not even know what our instincts are! I also learned or relearned that the thing itself—paying attention to and revealing the truth of the thing itself—can be vastly more powerful than any fancy footwork with constructed metaphor (by this I mean metaphors we make vs. the ones that emerge organically if we attend closely enough to real things), or acrobatic language. There is nothing more like the blood of children than “without fuss, children’s blood.” Neruda understood that and we can learn from his understanding.
With all this said, this week’s writing prompt will begin with meticulous attention and reporting, followed by a brief but potent bit of telling. Here’s how to work your way through it, step by step (along with two extraordinary examples).
Writing Prompt: Absolute Attention is Prayer
For this week’s prompt, begin by observing something in the external world as closely and precisely as humanly possible. Just the thing itself. This thing should not be you. It should also not be an action you are taking or a sensation you are feeling. Let’s step away from the self for the first part of this exercise. Choose something outside of yourself—an object, plant, animal, process (i.e., water flowing down the outside of a window), etc. In fact, I like to start with several options, just in case my first or second or third choice becomes too unbearable or won’t open like a window, the way Howe promises. Once you’ve finally settled on something to observe, something that sparks with potential, that crackles a little, then hunker down and give this thing the full force of your attention, to the point where the attention truly does become like prayer. Stick with this thing, observing and describing it until one of two things happens: it exhausts you or it opens.
How do you know which is happening?
Well, it’s kind of obvious. If you’ve stayed with the thing itself for long enough that it begins to offer itself to your imagination, as Mary Oliver promises, you will feel a stirring. You will. For example, you might be overwhelmed by a memory, an experience, a moment. Or you might find you are being tugged at by an idea or a revelation of some kind. The moment is wonderful! Dwell in it for a time with curiosity. Do not attach too soon to a single direction. Instead, investigate and record in vivid, concrete detail the memory, experience, moment, idea, or revelation with as much curiosity, devotion, and attention to detail as you have given to the external observation.
At this point, you can begin to explore connections between the external object/plant/animal/process and the memory/experience/moment/idea/revelation until you begin to understand the shape you might step into with this piece.
The two shapes I understand best for this kind of work are the same examples I gave in the Eleven Things post (which is why I presented them there):
A shape in which the external observation at first stays close and small, as with Mary Oliver’s meticulous description, in her iconic poem The Summer Day, of a grasshopper in the palm of her hand, which then suddenly—this suddenness is important—opens up into a philosophical proclamation that feels vast and real. In The Summer Day, the shift from external to internal happens at line eleven (of nineteen, so exactly halfway), when we move from the grasshopper opening her wings to the narrator talking about prayer: Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away / I don't know exactly what a prayer is. In this shape, it is important that the external portion be maintained until at least the halfway point.
A shape in which the external observation cleaves closely to a singular experience—an event that is definable and moves through a brief and well-defined slice of time—describing that experience only through external, concrete observations, sensory details, and physical action and description, no analysis. Eventually and suddenly—and the suddenness is important—the narration leaps to a reflective observation that makes clear meaning from the described experience. This is what Marie Howe does so gorgeously in her poem, The Boy. Howe makes the shift from external to internal in the sixth stanza (of eight, so at the 75% mark) when she takes us from her brother sitting in silence at the dinner table to her reflection (from a future point in time) about the long shadow of this incident and the family culture that allowed it. I don’t think Howe’s reflection would be nearly as powerful were it not earned by the six stanzas of disciplined, close, precise, external observation that precede these powerful last lines:
What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.
I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,
calling and calling his name.
To sculpt the raw material you generate from this prompt into something complete, try to push, pull, and press your observations into one of two shapes I describe above—as seen in The Summer Day or The Boy. Hold yourself to a strict word count (your finished piece should be no longer than the one you’re shaping yours after). Don’t worry about copying the structure of the inspiration poem too closely. This is about distinguishing between external observation (showing) and internal observation (telling) with surgical precision. And it’s about learning structure, too! If your end result is too similar to the published work, you can keep revising until it is not, paying strict attention to external vs. internal. Or you can complete it as an “after” piece. If you go the “after” route, be careful not to draw from the other writer’s actual images. The images in your work should be your own. What we are doing here is learning from other skilled writers how to purposefully distinguish between different modes of writing (in this case, external and internal) and how to achieve balance and structure. Another thing you can do to take your piece further from its source is to revise it into a longer piece of work, so that it no longer bears such close resemblance to its inspiration.
Whatever you do, be open to ending up in a place you didn’t expect.
PS: Reminder that Elephant Rock’s January classes are registering (along with spring courses, too!). I have two spots left for the beloved Writing in the Dark workshop, the generative course that meets on Zoom for six consecutive Thursday evenings starting January 19, and from which dozens of pieces have gone on to be published everywhere from Brevity to Fourth Genre to Longridge Review to many, many others. And Jill Swenson has a few spots in both her Writing With Brain & Body course and her Query Clinic. Would love for you to join us!
