What to do About Lost Focus

by William Alan Rieser

This issue has been addressed by some though infrequently. Worse, it is one of those dilemmas that everyone feels they must address as a personal challenge, the net result of which is often poor. This is because the gauntlet of focus is not addressed with an organized plan, certainly not one that can be used by all artists. What must writers, painters and sculptors do when their brains have been clamped by unpredictable events? To broach this topic, to have any sort of chance at making a solution meaningful, we must first define what most of us think of as concentration.

I was sitting at the keyboard that morning, completing the 8th chapter of my latest novel, my first attempt at mainstream. I normally write SF/F, but deliberately limited myself by making only the premise fantastic. It was about a miraculous cure for all the world’s diseases. Suddenly, September 11 reared its ugly head and cut off all creative circulation. It was as though a scimitar sliced me up the middle and I could think of nothing but death for days on end. Time after time the tragedy kept coming at me via the news and it hurt terribly because I was born within sight of the WTC. As a New Yorker, my various responses just boiled over and there was no hope of recovering the novel. I didn’t want to go about saving a humanity that could allow September 11 to happen.

That is what kills focus, a direct challenge to your premise or motive for writing it, regardless of how prolific you are. Artists tend to call it flow, where one idea leads to another in a continuous stream of cooperating little gems, all cohesively packed together in a single expression. What I experienced is the same thing that happens to everyone under more or less similar trauma, though usually much less. I call it blow, because it was a veritable blow-out of inspiration and everything else that contributes to creativity. My sense of self guidance abandoned me altogether. I think it may be instructive to show you how I clawed my way out of this pit.

Before the testimonials, concerts, charities and elegies began having any prominence on TV, I thought about the victims and the plight of their families in terms I hadn’t used in years. I forced myself to memorialize them in poetry, pitiful as far as making a personal contribution, but the best I could do. A writer’s forum, namely http://www.wordthunder.com run by Sarah Mankowski, recognized its need to be stated and published it, along with similar gut wrenching torments from other writers. That was my first step out of the void and it illustrates an old principle: If what you are doing isn’t working well, walk away from it and return later. In other words, focus on something else for a time.

Having done that, I still couldn’t return to my novel, and sought a compromise. If I was unable to resume my self imposed task, perhaps I might find something that challenged me in a different area. I settled on the antithesis of unhappiness, namely humor. I began writing articles, not for authors, but for casual readers or those who like SF/F. Lo and behold, a new zine sprang out of the ashes somehow. Its editor, Sarah Dobbs of http://scifantastic.tripod.com, knew who I was and was thrilled to receive one of my short stories. With that kind of encouragement, I chanced sending her a funny little interpretation on one of her own articles. She loved it and I’ve been torturing her readers with my outrageous brand of comedy ever since. That was the second step out of the void. It taught me my peculiar method of crawling back.

Fortified with small successes, I began doing other articles, especially those dedicated to writing which I was now able to think about clearly. It pleased me to offer help to others from within my still pervasive crisis. With a few more acceptances from sites such as oneofus.co.uk by Paul Nattress, I finally managed to reach that awful brink by pulling myself up and out. Thank God for good people and responsible editors like those mentioned above. They may be rare, but they are definitely out there.

Now I am back and into my novel. At this writing, I’m in chapter 13 and its coming along as originally intended. The tragedy, of course, will never be forgotten. Neither will I forget how it decimated my ability to create. For a while there, all I could think about was exacerbating the problem, by writing diatribes and exposes, things that would only contribute to ever more hurt and sadness. In retrospect, I can see that journalists and news commentators tend to fill that role. No original thinkers need apply. If you wish to tread the waters between blow and flow, you’ll have to build something unsinkable. For me, I’d rather float about on top, especially having seen the depths below.

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