The Art of Paying Attention
A story is a series of moments of noticing.
Dear Reader,
I don’t think I need to make the case that we’re living in an age of distraction.
Any waking (or even sleeping) moment might be filled with 13 notifications pinging through the air from 13 different devices or internet platforms—along with your own brain sending its own 13 pings, because it’s been trained to ping (check your email, check your social media, check your something or other).
Life is lived in between pings. Which is an undesireable way for most of us to live. Because we don’t get the opportunity to pay attention to anything, least of all ourselves.
And paying attention is neccessary for happiness, meaning, and creation.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” wrote the poet Mary Oliver.
The question is, what are you devoted to? Are you devoted to the bustle of your to-do list? Are you devoted to the twisting crimps of the day’s most petty emotions? Or are you devoted to things more whimsical, more peculiar, more sensuous, more subversive, more lustrous, more delectable, more divine?
We tend to give our attention away too easily. A screen calls us like a siren, and we’re helplessly in thrall to its songs. The act of attention is an act of assertion, though: you’re claiming your life instead of being claimed by it.
If we pay attention to our attention, we’ll find an instruction manual on how to focus our gaze. Things that generally go unnoticed suddenly blossom with unexpected life. The twig, soon to fall off of a tree, trembling in the wind. The crumb on a plate that becomes a snowflake on our tongues.
One definition of a story: it’s a series of moments of attention.
So hone the craft of being alert to life. Notice gravity. Notice oil stains on pavement. Notice arabesques in dust. Notice the quiet glories hidden in people. Notice the pace of your breaths. There’s always a revelation to be found, a nuance to be traced.
“One tree is like another, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether,” wrote Mary Oliver.
Because Whimsicality
Helpless now against my connivings (so we shall not ask you to deliver the purloined letter).
There is certainly redemption in a loss of comprehension {yet I am literal, literal like a bug.}
Get ready to get ready, my father used to say.
I show my old snakehead smile, cool and mean. Ready.
Because a Haiku
Seagulls circling over tree tops—
Wings shining white
Against the black sky
Because a Quote
"A writer who knows what he's doing doesn't know very much."
~ Nelson Algren
Because Prompts Take Us to New Places
I like to take road trips for the sole purpose of looking for odd things on the roadside to take photos of. I love encountering scenes like this one, from Arizona, the dusty desert mixing with mystical spirituality, the trailer an assertion of living in a precarious place.
Use this photo as a prompt, as a random catalyst, as an igniter for any writing project you're working on.
Or … simply write a story about this photo in less than 250 words and share it.
All the Comfort Sin Can Provide
If you like this newsletter, please consider checking out my recently released collection of short stories, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide.
Lidia Yuknavitch said, “Somewhere between sinister and gleeful the characters in Grant Faulkner’s story collection All the Comfort Sin Can Provide blow open pleasure—guilty pleasure, unapologetic pleasure, accidental pleasure, repressed pleasure.”
