Finding Focus

 by Linda Rodriguez

All my life, I have been able to focus, intensely and ferociously, on anything to which I turn to my attention. At times, this has even been a problem. It's become a joke in my family that, if I am engrossed in reading, studying, writing, or just seriously thinking about some issue or problem, it will be almost impossible to gain my attention. When they were adolescents, my kids used to get a kick out of trying all kinds of elaborate performances to try to break my focus and gain my attention while the others watched. There were even small bets laid. No one ever won, not without pretending some kind of serious injury or other emergency.

This kind of fierce focus has been good to me through the years. It allowed me to graduate with two degrees cum laude while working multiple jobs and freelance contracts and raising kids as a single mom. It allowed me to meet an incredible deadline for a book imposed on me by my publishing house because of their own difficulties. I was able to write, completely revise, and have accepted (with few edits) an entire novel in less than 3 months. It allowed me to write another book while struggling through breast cancer with surgeries and all of its other invasive and weakening treatments and side effects. It has been one of my great personal strengths in life, and I have relied on it as long as I have lived.

Now, after being out of this process of writing a novel for a long time, because of spiraling health problems and a heavy load of freelance work I've had to do to keep afloat with all the medical bills, it's hard to get back into thinking in the fictional creative mode, which always relies on intense focus. Writing novels involves focusing so intensely on the characters, the setting, the characters' actions and the way they impact each other, and a million other things that you are immersed completely into that fictional world that you have created.

Sometimes, coming out of that world after a good stint of writing and facing the mundane, everyday world in which we live can be difficult and require very real time for adjustment. Sometimes, it's hard to cut off that focus and to turn off that imaginary world, so that you can act reasonably in this everyday world. This is one of the reasons that writers sometimes drank so much. They used alcohol to shut down their imaginative world and ease their way back into the world of their families and obligations.

Once lost, that habit of intense focus is hard to regain. It has always been such a part of my innate personality that I have never had to think about it or cultivate it. It was always just there when I reached out to access it, like one of my senses. To lose it like this does feel as if I have lost one of my innate senses, such as vision or hearing. It leaves me feeling that disoriented and dislocated from the world around me. I am, in a certain way, a broken person with this part of myself missing.

Consequently, I am really having problems working on my current novel right now. Between debilitating coughing spasms and my usual conglomeration of pain, I'm not getting sleep at night. This means that, during the day, I am moving as if through molasses, and that includes my mind, which seems to me to be full of sludge that keeps it from fully functioning. I am still having the health problems and still piled high with paying jobs, because, of course, we're still up to our necks in debt, thanks to medical bills. If anything, it's worse now, because my husband has been laid off from his long-time university job at an age where no one in this capitalist society wants to hire you. Still, it's time to get back to my own writing. I don't feel that I can avoid that any longer, just because it's painful to face that I no longer have what was once one of my great strengths.

I am aware that many of my fellow writers were not gifted, seemingly from birth, with this kind of deep focus, but have had to work hard to develop it through their own efforts. Consequently, I know it can be done and that whining about it is about as attractive as someone born wealthy complaining about the loss of their money. Now, I am trying to piece together how to develop what I was born with and never had to work for, and I'm not finding it easy, at all. Wish me luck.

How have you been able to develop the intense focus required for immersion in writing the novel? Have you developed any handy techniques or shortcuts? Inquiring minds want to know.

Linda Rodriguez's 12th book is The Fish That Got Away: The Sixth Guppy Anthology. Her 11th book was Fishy Business: The Fifth Guppy Anthology (edited). Dark Sister: Poems was her 10th book and a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, were published in 2017.  Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery featuring Cherokee detective, Skeet Bannion, and Revising the Character-Driven Novel will be published in 2021. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, Every Last Secret—and earlier books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film. 

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Native Writers Circle of the Americas, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Learn more about her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com