Your attention, please.

Week 1 : space / time / paying attention

Hello!

First and foremost, thanks for joining me. I’m glad you are here. If you haven’t already joined, the private Facebook group can be found HERE.

This will be taken down a couple of weeks after we finish, so as to protect the privacy of anything shared.

If you haven’t already, you can make a donation HERE (I’ve suggested £10 for the 4 weeks, but if that is currently a stretch, please just pay whatever you feel).

Don’t worry, none of this is a ploy to sell you further stuff at the end of the 4 weeks; I genuinely am just quite excited to get a bunch of people together and see what we create.

Each Monday for the next 4 weeks, I will send out a newsletter and prompt for you to explore. These will largely be based on poems, as that is the medium I work with most, but the prompts can be taken however you like. The idea is simply to practice creating time, space and focus to write; write songs, write letters, write a journal, don’t write at all- draw, paint, whatever. The point is, just take the time, find ways to steal back your focus for a small window of time in whichever way works for you. I won’t be doling out any tips on how to write specific forms of poetry, or giving advice on stanzas and line breaks. But if you find you like writing poetry and wish to explore all this further, I can happily make some excellent book and course suggestions.

My hope is that as well as writing prompts, we can share ideas on how to steal back our attention and cultivate focus; because my brain constantly feels like it has too many tabs open. It’s hard to write like this.

Most importantly, please do not make this another thing that you feel you signed up for and failed at; if it starts to become a chore, bin it off. Having said that, there are certain things we can do to set ourselves up well…

Create Space

Virginia Woolf writes of the necessity of “A Room of One’s Own” but my children are largely ignorant of such important matters and I have had to make do with the corner of the dining room table. I have made my space portable so I can migrate to other exciting corners of my house when the dining room table is needed for den building or spilling crap all over.

I am always super intrigued at where people choose to write and love nosying at people’s workspaces. Agatha Christie famously wrote in the bath, with a good supply of apples at hand. Austin Kleon (“Steal Like an Artist” author) has one analogue desk filled with books, pens and paper where ideas get written down, and one digital, where things get solidified and sent off. Roald Dahl had his writing hut where he could sit and focus. Mine is slightly more modest and looks like this:

My ramshackle writing space, complete with Ted Lasso card and way too many notebooks.

If you like, before you get started, have a think about;

• Where would you like to write this week? Have a look at the space. Make it ever so slightly more yours.

• If you already have a space where you work/zoom/write/record, could you try a different space for these writing prompts?

Create Time

I could talk for A LONG TIME about this, but I will resist the urge. It’s an emotive topic, and I know that it can feel impossible to create the time. My hope is that committing to writing each week will highlight that there are pockets of time, we just need to grab them back from elsewhere. We will hopefully feel slightly better for doing so.

When I had Long Covid during all the many lockdowns, I was pretty unwell and struggled to looks after the kids. By 3.30pm each day, I was absolutely done with parenting and needed them to go on screens (and away from me) for a bit. My youngest daughter took my phone to play Roblox on, and I found that this period of time was where I first starting writing. Nowadays, I prefer mornings but tend to only get up early enough to squeeze in 15-30 mins before making all the breakfasts and snacks.

I loved reading about different writers habits in this article by James Clear (author of “Atomic Habits”- strong recommend here). Perhaps you want to try getting up 30 minutes earlier than usual and committing to writing for that time. Or perhaps you prefer to go on a walk and dictate notes. Whatever your preference, I think E.B. White is on to something when he says

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”

Whether you have kids or not, Summer can be a busy time and routines are a little out of whack. It can be really hard to find time for creative stuff, so it may be worth having a think about a couple of things before you start.

• Have a look at your week. Where would be a good space to write in? Block it off in your calendar. Only found 15 minutes? That’s fine- block it off anyway.

• How are you going to make it easy for yourself? Tell the people in your household when you will be writing. Set up your space and notebooks/computer so everything you need is in one place. I like to put focus mode on my word documents when writing them, and I turn the wifi off my phone and put it in another room.

Prompt 1. - Pay attention. Be Astonished. Tell about it.

Our prompt this week comes from one of my favourites; Mary Oliver. She writes a lot about attention, and I think it’s a great place to start. Paying attention is the first rule of any creative practice and for me, makes the world a much easier place to move through. Curiousity is a great antidote to fear. Once you start, you begin to notice more and more. Just write down what you observe and you are half way there.

This is a verse of a longer poem called “Sometimes” which you can read here in full.

IV.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

This week I’d love for us to take these instructions as a starting point. Find something super ordinary or overlooked and write about it. Really dig into it. Research it a little if you like, I’m not your Mum. Look- the Pencil Museum have created a whole tourist attraction around an ordinary object because inevitably, nothing is actually that ordinary. I love the way Wendy Cope writes about an orange.

When ill, I got a bit obsessed with moss, because the farthest I could walk was the wall at the end of my garden. I decided that each time I managed to make it to the wall, I would learn the name of something new that was growing on there. I will share the poem I wrote in our group.

If you are stuck for inspiration, a good old list poem works well, like this from Lemn Sissay. Simply free write, perhaps starting each line with “I like” or perhaps “I forget to look at…”. Don’t worry about rhyming; when you are done you can re-jig your lines to find a good structure, or simply use the as a jumping off point for exploring one thing in more detail.

Or, perhaps this week you just want to take notes? Keep your notebook on you/use your notes app; but write down bits and pieces of super ordinary conversation you hear as you go through the week. Sometimes we need to collect some things before we set pen to paper.

If you are struggling to get going, set a timer on your phone (turn wifi off) and just pick an object and write. Keep going until the timer is up. Perhaps it will turn out to be shit, but you have no way of knowing until you start writing. If it is shit, set the timer again and write something else.

Whatever you choose to do, I would absolutely love you to share it within the Facebook group, or in the comments.

Happy writing folks!

Em

P.s. Watchyoo listening to/reading? I’m loving this podcast by Tristan Harris (Centre of Humane Technology).