Stages of Attention
By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) | March 19, 2021 |
April 2020 in the ancient Greek city of Myra, now lying in contemporary Turkey. Image – iStockphoto: Mehmet Uğur Özer
Fits and Starts
I’ve noticed that when looking back at the year since the first major outbreaks of the coronavirus, what stands out are leftovers of various stages of understanding and concern and response, stages of attention, many of them reflective of the earnest but evolving understanding of COVID-19 among scientists–and a stunned public. None of this is meant, by the way, to be funny. It’s not in the least funny, though at times it’s ironic. And it’s worth a few minutes of thought.
There were videos–for adults–about how to wash your hands, remember? Some had such special instructions as, “Don’t forget your thumbs.” The real test became how fast you could sing Happy Birthday to You.
And because we’d so carefully remembered our thumbs, you soon found people on social media urgently asking each other how best to moisturize their chapped hands amid all the washing.
There were staging areas recommended for groceries-arriving and groceries already wiped down.
There were shortages of all the wrong things, and the resulting fixations on finding those things, now long returned to their usual state of mundanity–even as peculiar shortages in local stores still pop up today. In this part of the world, there have been great store-management apologies for a paucity of … Grape Nuts. If you’re the one hoarding the cereal, come clean now.
Disposable gloves needed to be researched and considered for nitrile vs. vinyl vs. latex, or those traffic-cop white cotton models. And why did the dark blue ones look so schmick?
At a certain stage, trying to get a friend or family member or colleague to understand the term aerosolized may have taken up a lot of energy and focus.
“It’s why that one-foot-by-two-feet piece of Plexiglas is not going to help except for direct spray,” you heard yourself gently explaining, “anymore than designating one end of the swimming pool for spitting will help. It’s in the air someone else exhales. And that’s all around you, see?”
And they didn’t see, many of them, because they simply couldn’t see.
- None of us can see transmission.
- You can’t see viral shedding.
- You can’t see an asymptomatic infection.
If anything, the low-cost pulse oximeter has become a favored device of the era, not only because it’s a rather cool technology but also because it renders something, anything, visible. You put in your index finger. Red lights are beamed into that finger. And it tells you your blood-oxygen level, your “SpO2.” High-altitude climbers knew this.
But then, a fairly recent turn in general practice seems to be easing another use of bio-feedback. It might be voiced along the lines of, “Wait a minute. If they’re asymptomatic, they won’t have a fever. Fever is a symptom. Oh, yeah.” Followed by the beep of the infrared thermometer being turned off.
And if someone’s nose isn’t covered by a face mask, has a tree fallen in the forest of CDC directives?
And What About Chapter Four Was So Hard?
In looking back over some content written a while ago, I’ve lately perceived a parallel here.
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh
At the outset, I should add that the old advice to “just put the thing down for a while, leave it alone” is actually good. Once you’ve gone through a certain number of pairs of nitrile gloves or hard-won disinfectant wipes, you can see things you weren’t detecting earlier in the work.
The amount of time you spent researching the shipping protocols for aluminum sculptures from France, for example. Why was that so important? Oh, gosh. It wasn’t at all important. And that intense focus on shifting those settings in a kind of rhythmic rotation … not so much.
As I gaze at what has to be one of the most extensive curations of face masks in the northern hemisphere–four different options hang near my front door alone, for a delivery person’s knock–I know that the stages of attention given to each level of the pandemic’s assault and our best, changing understandings of its danger have not been “wrong” or “dumb” or even as naïve as they may feel now.
Today, public health specialists work to help even the vaccinated-fortunate understand that the B.1.1.7 variant is particularly potent and a new variant can occur every time the virus moves from one person to another. The danger isn’t over. But maybe we know better now that this, too, is a passing level of insight that we’ll supercede as more people are inoculated and the pathogen has fewer available hosts, fewer jumps it can make, finally being boxed in by immunization.
The messaging of the moment is important now. The focus on the race between vaccination and the variants is vital for the moment we’ve reached.
And yet it will change again.
Like Chapter Four in that manuscript. Shipping aluminum sculpture really was, once, part of learning what one certain book was about. And what was learned about heavy transport? — might not have been what was expected.
Are there issues and points of narrative or characterization or plotting or technical background in your work that once consumed you and then became part of the collection of “former go-to masks” in that drawer? Did you know what a KN95 was at Chapter Seven? And does reviewing these stages of attention help you understand what you were trying to do all along–and what might happen if an unexpected variant arrives in Chapter Eight?
@Porter_Anderson is a fellow of the National Critics Institute. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and independent authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Priors: The Bookseller‘s The FutureBook in London, CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, and the United Nations’ WFP in Rome. is a recipient of London Book Fair’s International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. PorterAndersonMedia.com
We learn as we grow, as we live. In all things this is true. Medical science is ever evolving. But there has to be a starting point. FOR EVERYTHING. Some are better than others, so if I want to switch to that concept and focus on my writing, I have started one of my novels at least five different ways and am now back to an earlier version. Is it the right one? I hope some day to find out. Science is a savior, but it too works on its own time. I was all for washing down my groceries–we learn as we go. I’m still here. And as for GrapeNuts, I only recently learned there might be a shortage, so just like my time spent working those beginning lines in my novel, I didn’t take a chance, I stocked up. Stay well, Beth
See, I just knew it was you who’d made off with all the Grape Nuts, Beth. :)
Seriously, you’re so right about the time that processes take to evolve. In fact, it’s so prevalent in life (not just in pandemics and creative work) that the biggest surprise is that we’re always surprised. I know that even after writing news stories for 633 years, I’m still shocked to find how long a given story can take to put together. And it’s even more a factor in creative work in which we always try to tell ourselves, “This will take some time” — and then we seem to think it should be done within the hour.
I do love this theme of learning a book as you write it.
I find that the biggest authors I’ve interviewed were the ones readiest to concede that, and it has really helped me to understand that the act of writing might indeed be exploratory to much more degree than we sometimes think (or expect, at least). This does run counter to the general public’s perception, of course, many people thinking that a writer of note sits down with great command of her or his material, of course, ready to control the output with masterful decisiveness. (Not unlike the idea that public health emergency specialists know everything about a novel virus and are ready to make all the right moves with unerring accuracy.)
Less secure writers sometimes insist that they have everything worked out and nailed down, all under control, yep, perfectly according to plan. (And you know how those books read, lol.) I understand that, too, of course. We all want to look like, “Of course, I planned it that way.” And most marketing and PR work around authors does make it appear that it’s all right at their fingertips. The image of the searching, testing, often surprised author isn’t the one the marketing office thinks will sell.
“I had no clue what I was doing” just doesn’t work so well on the talk shows and in those Nobel acceptance speeches. :)
It’s become interesting to me in recent years, though, how common a fact this is. Even the committed outliners are telling me that the outline framework is only just that, scaffolding. And it gets moved around or rebuilt.
As you say, starting and starting and starting. Then restarting.
Here’s to turning over the ignition again — and again. Great to hear from you, as always, thanks, Beth!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I remember the shock and elation when, after countless revisions, I suddenly understood the theme of my WIP. More shocks have come since. Mini-revelations that have since been folded in, smoothed over, rendered invisible, but are still present in the work. What your post reminded me of, though, was my daughters list of instructions, written in gold with black bullet points, on the hour-by-hour care of her new baby (now nine) when she was handed to me for three days a week of care. All my daughter’s fears and insecurities were there in the details (“she loves when you sing when you’re changing her diaper.”). After a week or two, we were on our way to comfortable, but we grew vigilant in new and different ways. In this brave new world, the unexpected variant just keeps changing. Maybe that should be on a tee shirt. (insert smile here)
What a fabulous story, Susan, thanks for that. I love the notes (so revealing, yes) about baby care — and that’s so much like our current efforts to get our arms around what’s threatening us and scaring us and, so bafflingly, just a big annoyance to others who deny the mortal risks they’re taking.
And yes, understanding the theme of your own WIP. It’s a thing. I actually wish that commentary from authors about their work more frequently exposed this element of the work. Perhaps the most accomplished writers (for the sake of argument, let’s say the biggest sellers, though that is only one kind of accomplishment) are the ones who become best at sorting out the right theme. I know of many moments in which I’ve tried to force what I thought was a good theme onto what I was doing. Never worked, lol.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I remember beginning my last novel knowing many key, important things, but being ultimately wrong over many of the specifics. (e.g. No, that character doesn’t believe *that*, rather *that* fits with her sister.) It wasn’t until I walked my characters through the conflict of story–beyond the plexiglass, if you will–that I learned what worked and what didn’t to ensure the characters’ survival. Only then did all of it become clear.
Chaos is a teacher, whether it’s the chaos brought on by a novel virus or the act of writing a novel. We don’t know until we do what it’s going to teach us, but it’s probably always best to proceed with humility, a willingness to adapt, and eyes wide open (but nose covered).
Love this line, Therese: “Chaos is a teacher, whether it’s the chaos brought on by a novel virus or the act of writing a novel.”
And if anything, what makes the value of chaos so interesting is how much we try to either avoid it (because it’s destabilizing and really uncomfortable) or to apply what we learn from it to get control of it, prevent its return, to “get past all that chaos.” I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve thought I’d learned some lesson that I could use to “control things” better in the future. Fat chance, of course.
But that impulse to evade and/or contain chaos is probably impossible to break. As you say, we need to gather the humility to remember we won’t be running the show as we think we will, but we can learn from the rattle and roll all the things we needed to know.
Not necessarily CYA but certainly cover your nose. :)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Here’s what I observe that many writers believe is critical in early stages of developing a novel: plot.
Here is what many writers discover late in the process is actually important: the main character’s inner life, meaning not just moment-by-moment feelings but that human’s understandings of the world and the evolution of the self. Many describe that as the last to come clear and hardest part to get right.
Here’s what I wish writers knew would actually help them the most: it’s a process. There is discovery. A novel evolves, just like we humans do and you can trust that will happen.
All the worry and angst, so well documented in posts and comments here on WU, is unnecessary. Where you are right now with your novel is perfect. You will finish it. It will be good. By the time it’s done you’ll know what matters and that the experience of writing it wasn’t a pandemic but a beautiful challenge: a process that made your story—and you—wiser and better.
Excellent post, Porter. See you soon! I’m getting my first vaccine dose today. It’s transformative. I can see now the reasons I had to go through this past year, what I was supposed to discover, and it’s good.
Don!
Congratulations on Injection Uno! The Fauci Ouchie, lol. It is transformative, isn’t it? I’m now fully vaxxed and I feel the same way. There’s a sense of denouement to it. You feel various resolutions coming into position, albeit with the need to continue precautions, support the science, shepherd everyone you know toward the salon des seringues so they’ll get vaccinated, too.
There’s even something in the gratitude category to remembering how long one has managed to stay alive to reach the point of vaccination. This in itself represents a certain feat, even with much luck and medical guidance and political peril involved. It’s astonishing that these vaccinations have been managed so quickly. That, too, is partially luck, in that the mRNA platforms on which the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNtech vaccinations are based had been in development for years and could be moved into place.
And of all the right things you’re saying about the importance of the inner life of the main character over all else (completely true) and about that being the toughest discovery (also true), what strikes me is something I’ve said in less gracious ways in the past: “All the worry and angst, so well documented in posts and comments here on WU, is unnecessary.”
I’ve come to think that there are two stories being written, two tales told at once. One is the story the writer is learning to tell in producing a book. The other is the story concocted by the writer’s emotional set and imagination and stress levels and insecurities, and that story is that angst, that worry, the tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth which, as you say, is unnecessary. That second story could be one in which learning one’s book is great, discovering what it’s about is upbeat, finding it instead of ordaining it is logical and joyous and anticipated.
I was jokingly saying in an earlier comment that having major authors get onto talk shows to announce that they had no clue what they were writing about when they started would hardly match the public’s concept of that marvelous command-and-control author sitting down to deploy masterful intellectual creativity with unerring certitude. But it sure would be honest and refreshing.
In so many things, the last thing we think we have time for is evolution, right? :)
Here’s to remembering more often that, as you say, writing isn’t “a pandemic but a beautiful challenge: a process that made your story—and you—wiser and better.”
And don’t miss Jab No. 2! :)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
A lovely essay, Porter. Writing has taught me so much and as is my nature, I question everything. Questioning the status quo brought me to my faith. What a journey! I remember Rilke’s beautiful quote: “Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the question now.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1927
I love that quote, Vijaya, and have read it many times because I know it applies to me and I believe it applies to my characters who live and breathe on the page. Thanks for the reminder.
Hear, hear!
-p.
Boy, Vijaya,
What a gorgeous Rilke line, “Live the question now.” That’s the whole thing in a nutshell, isn’t it?
Thanks for that, a super response, as always, and I’ll take that line away with me, many questions ahead to be lived. :)
Best for now,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson