Many thanks to my guest blogger today, Martha Nichols.
Martha is a freelance magazine writer and editor who runs WOMEN = BOOKS, the blog for the Women’s Review of Books based at Wellesley College. She also teaches in the journalism program at the Harvard University Extension School.
If MAADD didn’t evoke drunk drivers and an earlier generation of enraged mothers, I’d be all over it: Middle-Aged Attention Deficit Disorder.
My attention divides and divides again; I can’t even spin a good acronym without referencing something else. This is a bad thing—right?
I used to think that was a rhetorical question. The answer was obviously yes. Lack of focus took me away from my work. It stopped me from following through on a thought; it made me unable to fix the logic of a short story. I became just plain grumpy and distracted, a state in which I couldn’t wrestle ideas into their proper form.
But lately I’ve had the strangest epiphany: Maybe writers need a little ADD. Maybe their brains need to be shaken, not stirred.
How else to explain why I’m writing more and better than I have in years? I’m far busier—sometimes exhaustingly, hopelessly, ridiculously busier—than when I had more uninterrupted time in my schedule to write.
Once my son Nick joined our family, I dropped much of my freelance editing business. When he was a baby, then a toddler, I felt constantly distracted and unproductive. Ironically, I was focusing on my own fiction writing—part-time, to be sure, but that level of focus seems luxurious now.
And it didn’t work for me.
Reams have been written about the fractured attention of mother-writers, whether they’re Anne Tyler famously burning the midnight oil after her kids were asleep or Grace Paley producing telegraphic short stories at the kitchen table.
I’m not ADD in any clinical sense. I’m a parent. But one book that became a touchstone for me a few years ago was Edward Hallowell’s CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!
Hallowell, a psychiatrist in the Boston area, has popularized ADD and ADHD as diagnoses, and has written a number of well-known books about coping with these disorders. But in CrazyBusy, he goes a step farther, arguing that our multi-tasking, post-millennial, “CrackBerry” era fosters a form of cultural ADD. In that sense, we’re all suffering.
I used to agree completely. Two years ago, when my son entered kindergarten, I gave myself permission to go back to full-time work. It took awhile to settle into my current whirl, and I felt like a juggler with one hand and five hundred torches. I’m a freelancer, so finding work was more complicated than just landing a single job.
There are still times when I wish I had one employer or one work mode—editor or writer or teacher or blog manager—rather than shifting among them all.
But what’s surprised me is how alive my mind feels now. I’ve gotten better at mental juggling. I won’t claim I’m more organized, but my constantly dividing and skipping attention seems to be sparking me as a writer. I find myself excited by ideas all the time.
A few years back—say, 2006, when CrazyBusy first came out—this attitude would have seemed like grounds for Lithium. When my son was four or five, his wildly shifting attention seemed a match for my own disintegrating brain. I found it profoundly disturbing to be so scattered. I kept exhorting him to focus, as if focus and control of all those flowing ideas were a kind of Holy Grail I was searching for myself.
There’s no doubt some of my attention struggles were and are physiologically rooted. Many researchers now believe that what those of us in middle age really experience is failing attention. In “The Midlife Memory Meltdown,”an article for O magazine adapted from her book on the topic, journalist Cathryn Jakobson Ramin says of our aging brains:
“When the frontal lobes are in top form, they’re adept at figuring out what’s important for the job at hand and what’s irrelevant blather; a sort of neural “bouncer” automatically keeps out unnecessary information. In middle age, that bouncer takes a lot of coffee breaks. Instead of focusing on the report that’s due, you find yourself wondering what’s for dinner. Even background noise—the phone chatter of the coworker in the next cubicle—can impair your ability to concentrate on the task before you.”
But I’ve always been like this. I’m great at synthesizing ideas, but I’ve never been good at memorizing facts. Historical dates elude me; foreign vocabulary evaporates as soon as I’m not immersed in it. (My French is terrible, and I lived in France. And let’s not even mention—not here, anyway—the Vietnamese class I’m currently taking.)
The best shift for me has been one of attitude, not a new wonder drug or a brain transplant. I’ve learned to embrace my proliferating ideas, to find in the strange twists a far clearer, more personal writing voice. This Martha is not quite so careful, has more fun, and is —I think—more fun to read.
Blogging encourages such creative idea generation, which may be why I’ve taken to it. It’s no accident that I’m running four blogs now, one in an editorial capacity with multiple authors on assignment with various deadlines.
In CrazyBusy, Hallowell himself distinguishes between the “stress” that gets your juices flowing and the anxiety-producing mess of having too many commitments:
“If you’re busy doing what matters to you, then being busy is bliss. You’ve found a rhythm for your life that works for you. This world is bursting with possibilities; its energy can be contagious. If you catch the bug, you want to jump out of bed each day and get busy, not because you are run ragged by details or because you are keeping the wolf from your door, but because you are in love with this fast life.”
It’s also true that I’m doing less fiction writing these days. My excuse for the moment is that I need to be entrepreneurial with WOMEN = BOOKS and my other blogs. Traditional print journalism and book-publishing have imploded; like so many magazine writers, I feel compelled to get online and to make the future happen tout de suite.
An excuse is an excuse is an excuse, however. Somewhere under the blizzard of ideas, I know it’s time for me to focus again on longer writing projects, too. I need to find a balance, although I’ve never been good at that.
We all have our particular demons to conquer. Mine is an extremely abusive, judgmental inner editor. Maybe all that’s changed is that I now accept both my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. I no longer bludgeon myself into perfectly transparent, orderly prose—and that’s liberating—at least for me.
Yet there’s a bit of cultural demonizing at play here as well. Scattered attention seems like a formidable problem if you believe order is all—or that the only real goal is an end product. But creative flow is not served by an obsession with order. And for writers, being in control is not necessarily a good thing.
So what say you, fellow writers and readers? Do you struggle with divided attention? Do you ever find it a blessing?
Where was I?
Martha Nichols
http://marthanicholsonline.blogspot.com
WOMEN = BOOKS: http://www.wcwonline.org/wrbblog
This post has been adapted from “Am I Crazy to Study Vietnamese?” on Martha Nichols Online. I also blog at Talking Writing and Adopt-a-tude
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Martha – First, thanks for all of those helpful articles and all of the background infromation on ADD and on what happens to our attention as we get older. It’s really useful!
As far as attention goes, I, too, find my attention almost frantically divided. I have a husband and daughter, a full-time university position (plus freelance work I do), and a full-time passion for writing that I’ve only started exploring in the last few years. Sometimes, like you, I find it exhausting beyond words. But most of the time, it’s exhilarating. And I’ve found when I do try to focus too much on one thing, that I’m not as inspired. I think that each aspect of what I do gives a creative “jolt” to the others. Sorry – what was your question? ; )
Wow, great post. I’ll pop over to your blog and check it out.
Awesome post! I’ve been describing my life as Crazy Busy a lot lately – who knew I was borrowing the phrase?? I totally agree – my brain is constantly working on multiple tasks. And I’m having piles of fun :)
My attention has been fragmented increasingly in the past two years by the hormonal shifts of perimenopause. I wish I were in a financial position to regard my own ditziness as a splendorous time of life. I also wish more medical research was being done in this area to provide women with safe, effective pharmaceutical aids. But it’s no and no. So I ditz my way through another day.
Suzanne Adair
http://www.suzanneadair.com
I’ve always thought that if I could focus, I’d probably weigh 350 pounds, because I spend so much time wandering the house wondering what the heck I was doing that brought me to that room. A leaky brain is my form of exercise.
When I write, I tend to plot walking around, which of course leads to more and more distractions.
Wow, Martha, what an encouraging note to us fellow ADD-ites. Oh look…shiny!
I coach young writers (and myself, constantly) to “not get in the way of the writing.” If you don’t mind, I will quote from this blog post in my workshop, with attribution of course.
Thanks so much for this post.
Thanks all, for your great feedback, and I’m glad to pass along the references to Hallowell’s CrazyBusy. I think it’s a great book for figuring out what really matters—and then trying to pare away the rest.
Elizabeth SC—thanks for the opportunity to post here with this great community of writers—and Terry: Yes, it’s so true that I often do my best thinking while I’m walking or otherwise in motion. It’s an interesting form of focus, almost Zen-like: I’m away from the mental distractions of the computer, my body is working (which it needs to do), and my mind is free to go a little deeper and to get a little looser.
Suzanne, the financial piece does make it hard, because you’ve got most of a day going to other people’s work while your mind is cranking away in another key. As a writer, paid only off and on, I’ve struggled with this my whole adult life.
One last thought: It’s always said that if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. But just how much mental busyness is good for a writer?
I’m still not sure.
Glen: Of course you may quote from the post with attribution—send your students to my blog, too, and to Talking Writing:
http://talkingwriting.blogspot.com
If any of you would like to do a guest post on Talking Writing, just let me know via talkingwriting@gmail.com
I’ve really enjoyed the great back-and-forth this week, just as I enjoy Elizabeth’s posts. Thanks!
I used to be able to multi-task with great skill and focus. Now, not so much. The busyness does spark creativity, but i find when I sit down to write, I need my mind to be clear of my to-do list–at least as much as humanly possible.
Thanks, Martha, for this thoughtful post.And thanks, elizabeth, for hosting her.
karen
Enjoyed your article very much, Martha. I tend to agree we can benefit from “divided attention” if we learn how to flow with it and not struugle against it and get frustrated. It’s all in the attitude and obviously your attitude is a healthy one in the matter.
Marvin D Wilson
Marvin hit the nail on this one for me. I work on learing how to “flow with it and not struggle against it and (thus) get frustrated.” It’s gotten easier for me – with a lot of practice!
Oh, I am the the master of diffused awareness! My mind is scattered everywhere, and the older I get, the worse it becomes.
I like your new acronym for MAADD!
Very on point for writers, journalists and mothers. Thank you. Christ Beatty writes something similar in his handbook to NaNoWriMo. To paraphrase, he says we can set aside entire days or weeks for writing and find numerous other non-tasks to fill that space. But see three minutes here or one hour there, and creativity will flow to fill the void. Actually, I think I said it better than he did! But the point is we are all split in a hundred directions, but, in a way, it can help us organize.
Thanks for the links and background.
Michele
SouthernCityMysteries
Mea culpa…It’s Chris Baty.
Michele
SouthernCityMysteries
Martha–Thanks so much for this great post. I feel like it was written for me! I weave together little bits and pieces of dialogue, plot, and setting from post it notes, receipts, etc from my day in the car and make a novel from it. It’s crazy! But it does seem to work. And, as you noted, I’m more productive the more I have to do!
Elizabeth
Excellent post! I love this bit: “Blogging encourages such creative idea generation” — That’s one of the reasons I do it, too, although I never thought of it until you wrote it here!
I work better as a multi-tasker, when I don’t have time to procrastinate. I like being busy! There are a lot of us out there…
I feel scattered and pulled by different projects going on simultaneously. My way of coping is to make lists. Every day. I add to the list, I mark off accomplishments. But without the list, I’d be lost.
Helen
Straight From Hel
Wonderful post, Martha! I think most women (writers or not) have the ability to think about many different things at the same time. We’re always thinking.
Elspeth
Can I ever relate to MAADD – although I probably need to add Post-Middle-Aged Attention Deficit Disorder to my description! I enjoyed this article very much and feel better about my thoughts being so scattered.
Elizabeth – Hope you’re feeling better. Check out my latest blog post for a little well-deserved “gift” for you!