Where You Pay Attention

by Nancy Sackheim

Although Howard Rheingold was examining the social and political ramifications of online networking when he wrote in The Virtual Community, "...Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention," his directive also serves as a pointed reminder to writers.   

The internet community is also the topic of Charlie Warzel's conversation with Michael Goldhaber in I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age, but equally applicable to writers is Goldhaber's realization that attention is requisite for every action we take, and when you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else. Do you really think you are paying attention to everything when you attempt to multi-task?

In the The Art of Paying Attention Michelle Dean March says "What a writer is supposed to do is pay attention. A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she’s brought to evaluate.

Paying attention is the only thing that guarantees insight. It is the only real weapon we have against power, too. You can’t fight things you can’t actually see. The power a writer has is the power to make things visible, and they are the things that we don’t typically look at or think about. Telling a story about someone has enormous power. People forget a headline. They remember a story." 

It's a simple formula. Pay attention. Write. Don’t forget to pay attention to where you are paying attention.

Photo by Meghan Schiereck on Unsplash