Creativity, Attention and Focus: YOU make something interesting

Living the ADHD life is a bit like being jerked around on a rollercoaster:  I'm always in motion, it's always exciting, and the view is always changing.  Hold on tight!

My personal attention span has a limit of about 11 minutes.  If I've set a timer, I can probably stay with a task for 15 minutes, but the last four minutes is really, really hard.

I got through college and graduate school literally 15 minutes at a time.  My writing and creative processes are punctuated by periods of intense physical activity - the need to calm myself, to burn off the energy stored up while sitting still.  Housework and tedious tasks are often accomplished in spurts, between writing or drawing (if I can stay away from video games).

Thus I am fascinated by Annie Dillard's insights about artistic endeavor and creativity.  I like this quote, because it reminds me that no object or task is inherently interesting - it's really what we bring to the table that makes the experience worthwhile.

At the beginning of the year, this is a great thing to remember!

---

When Annie Dillard was a child, she discovered The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides, and began to sketch her baseball glove every day.  Looking back from an adult perspective, she wrote:

   One thing struck me as odd and interesting.  A gesture drawing took forty-five seconds; a Sustained Study took all morning.  From any still-life arrangement or model's pose, the artist could produce either a short study or a long one.  Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn't take it, at pleasure.  And, similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest; instead things were interesting as long as you had attention to give them.  How long does it take to draw a baseball mitt?  As much time as you care to give it.  Not an infinite amount of time, but more time than you first imagined.  For many days, so long as you want to keep drawing that mitt, and studying that mitt, there will always be a new and finer layer of distinctions to draw out and lay in.  Your attention discovers— seems thereby to produce—an array of interesting features in any object, like a lamp.

Dillard, Annie.  AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD.  PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK/AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD/THE WRITING LIFE.  Camp Hills, PA:  Harper and Row, 1990.  Book of the Month Club edition.  Originally published 1987.  p. 79.