Hi, I’m Elizabeth Ferretti. I’m an award-winning fiction and non-fiction writer, with a special interest in writing’s impact on mental, as well as more general, wellbeing. In this substack post I look at writing and attention. This blog was originally posted on Substack.
For George Orwell, examining his motivation to write led to his brilliant essay ‘Why I Write’ (1949) It was a question that came up in a recent writing class I was hosting. Why turn up and write for an hour? What’s the point?
There are many reasons why I write, and no doubt as many reasons to write as there are people who write, but in this piece my focus is on one – attention, and more specifically where our attention is directed.
As social beings, part of complex societies, it’s natural for our attention to be focussed outwards. And with the arrival of social media, functioning at least in part as a marketplace, our attention is being fought over. This commodity of our attention is worth a tonne of money. To misquote President Clinton’s campaign manager, James Carville: “the attention economy, stupid”. However uncomfortable it is to admit, the attention economy’s effects on our behaviour, decisions and beliefs are powerful and we’re only just beginning to see and understand how deep they go. But what if we saw writing as a way to draw some of that attention away for ourselves? Could that offer another answer to the question of ‘why I write’?
I want to go off on a tangent before coming back to the link between writing and where we gift our attention. One of my most passionate beliefs is that we don’t have to justify why we write or that we write – although justification is a core theme in Orwell’s essay (among many other things). He was writing to be published, for an audience. I interpret some of his thinking as also concerning why a reader should lend their attention to his words.
These are both important considerations, but two points come to mind. First, why do we feel any need to justify why we write? (A sentiment expressed beautifully by Elif Shafak in her Substack today. She likened this to questioning why we breathe.) Second, we don’t have to have an audience for our writing to have intrinsic value. Beliefs about writing for an audience being the only valid reason to write, and feeling the need to justify the act of writing to ourselves and / or others, are a deeply ingrained part of my British culture. Loosening their grip on me has taken a long old time. These stories still lurk around in the shadows.
Yet, we may write simply to express ourselves. An obvious point, but not understanding that stopped me from writing anything at all until I was nearly 40. Since then I’ve loved how writing lets me explore inner dialogue outside normal social interactions. It has helped me know myself. It has given me space to examine, contemplate, think. And here’s the link I’ve been working towards – it’s offered me a space where nothing is clamouring for my attention.
When I write, I’m making a choice about where I place my attention. In using writing as a tool to claim back my attention I’m reminded that other ways of being in the world are open to me than the dominant one that surrounds me. And I don’t even have to be writing anything remotely intelligent or profound for this to be true. No one ever has to read what I write for this still to be true.
I began this piece with one of my writing heroes, whose clarity of language and thought are a lodestone for me, and I’ll end with him. One of the major justifications Orwell found for writing was political. He meant it in a way that I also hold dear in my own fiction, that it is a response to and an examination of events in the world. But I also see that to dedicate even a short time to writing, whatever form that writing takes, is an act of will. Will is one of the most powerful tools we have, and using that will to choose where to place our attention has profound consequences.
Happy writing wherever you are!
PS Want to make more space for writing in your life? On Mondays, I host Write Together – an online writing hour in three time slots across the day – to help people sit down and write, and to love writing!
To find out more: www.writerrevealed.co.uk