By Annette Cole Mastron, Communications
Director for Southern Writers Magazine
Writing a blog post for Suite T every other week doesn’t
sound like a daunting task. At times, it can be difficult to be inspired to
provide quality information that will benefit our readers. So this week began
with me saying, “What to write...I’m late, I’m late for Thursday’s date.”
If this conjures up images of the
“White Rabbit” in Lewis Carroll's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, then
you have the correct image of me this past Tuesday.
To
solve this problem I turned to Facebook which believe it or not, has inspired
many interesting blog posts in the past. Thankfully, I was not disappointed. I
ran across author
Ann Patchett’s PBS three-minute video titled “Retrain Your Shrinking Attention
Span.” The #IMHO segment on PBS
Newshour appeared on Mar 12, 2018. Just an FYI, #IMHO is the hashtag for “In My
Humble Opinion.” Who knew?
In
this video, Patchett rhetorically asks, “What’s the secret to writing novels? Or
baking a perfect cake?” At this link take 3 minutes, yes, you’ve got three
minutes to immediately help you become more focused on any task at hand. Of
course, you could be like my friend who read my rough draft of this blog post
and said she’d “have
to watch it in 1 1/2 minute installments. That's my attention span.” She
cracks me up but makes a valid point. Our 24/7 notifications
of breaking events fuels our brains' difficulty in focusing on the task at hand.
Can you identify?
For the record, I’m not a scratch baker. I lean towards
cake mixes with add-ins to make a cake my own creation. Much like, Food Network
star and author, Sandra Lee. Her recipes primarily use a base of ready
made grocery items that she tweaks in her show aptly named, Semi-Homemade. Lee always makes a signature cocktail to compliment every shows unique recipes
and tablescapes. Should I create a signature cocktail to aid in my writing?
Some authors do, I’ve heard. See, I just jumped down another rabbit hole
because Ann Patchett talked about making a cake from scratch. I also googled
Food Network for the links to Sandra Lee’s show and googled Amazon for a link
to Lee’s and Patchett’s books in case our blog readers are curious. Time to
FOCUS, again.
I thought someone probably developed acronyms for the word
FOCUS. Googled it and there it was:
F -Follow
O-One
C-Course
U-Until
S -Successful
Shift back to Ann Patchett, an international bestselling author. She has seven successful novels
and three nonfiction books. She contributes essays and critiques to various
newspapers and journals. Last but certainly not least, she owns a bookstore in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. She has this focus thing down. So I’ve
decided to give “retraining my attention span” a whirl. My plan is to try to focus and be fully
present when presented with a particular task. I will turn off my phone with
all those instant notifications and resist multitasking even when I am
not. Maybe one day, I will make a scratch cake or a “writing blog”
cocktail but first I’m scheduling this blog post for all to enjoy in cyber
land. See I CAN focus and #IMHO so can You.
Are you willing
to join me and Ann Patchett and give “retraining your attention span” so you
can write and FOCUS a try?
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