Writing as synchronizing with reality

This is the second part on writing as necessary friction.

“At Breakfast” by Laurits Andersen Ring (from Nationalmuseum)

When you engage in a sustained intellectual activity it compels you to pay attention to the world in a different way.

I rarely have the luxury of a full day to write so my writing is parceled out in short bursts between other activities. But even though the act of writing itself is done in little snatches of time, I am concentrating on the same essay topic over days and weeks. I constantly think about it, turning it over and examining it from different angles in my head. This attentional focus helps me notice new ideas and knowledge, especially when they show up in unexpected places.

Take this essay as an example. I started thinking about my writing process as a follow-up to my last post on my reading habit. I had already collected quite a few essays for reference (writers love to write about writing!) and began to draft the outline. I didn’t need more quotations or resources. And yet as I went through my normal daily life, doing nothing special or different, I started to uncover related concepts in the world around me.

Sometimes it is an unplanned but explainable discovery. Of course, while reading an essay collection on creativity in science and engineering, it makes sense that I would come across one on the value of writing. The beginning of the year tends to inspire meta-commentary on social shifts and technological anxiety. It’s understandable that the future of writing is a common theme in newsletters and essays. And though it’s always a small surprise and delight to find these new snippets that feed my ongoing preoccupation, it’s not exactly shocking.

Other times, the discovery of a connection is so unexpected that it feels like a revelation. This has happened to me in all sorts of arenas. I show up to a museum to find an exhibition meditating on the same themes. I walk to the bookstore, flip open a random book, and read a passage that perfectly unknots a thorny detail in my essay. A friend apropos of nothing brings up a concept I’m mulling over. These moments are serendipitous, like my mind is finally aligning with the information right there in plain sight.

I call this synchronizing with reality. The term “synchronizing” conveys the coincidental timing of these observations. I am not actively seeking out this information for my writing. Rather, I am quietly developing mental constructs for the ideas my mind is deeply engaged on. So with this subconscious pattern-matching, all of a sudden, I can finally spot the same ideas out in the wild.

James Somers, arguing that everyone should write more, describes this experience as a kind of attentional gravity well:

When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation. A preoccupation, in that sense, is a hell of a useful thing for a mind.

The problem is that without this mental focusing, or preoccupation as Somers calls it, we are unlikely to perceive the right details. Reality is hyper-dense with information and our brains have to filter it to a smaller subset to function at all. Useful data is just as likely to be discarded as useless ones, unless we can force ourselves to pay attention.

One of my favorite essays is by John Salvatier, titled Reality has a surprising amount of detail. Salvatier describes the collision between theory and reality, and how even the most useful mental frameworks like physics and mathematics are lacking important real-world properties. For example when constructing stairs, it’s not enough to just use trigonometry to figure out the correct angle to cut the wood, but you also need to account for the material properties (board warping), the physical limitations of tools, and the order of operations to install each piece.

“Frascati, architectural study” by John Singer Sargent (from National Gallery of Art)

This generalizes to all difficult tasks where intellectual understanding encounters brutal reality:

Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at?

This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.

Writing provides the necessary forcing function to create this perceptual shift. The preoccupation, the conceptual frameworks, the ongoing hyperfixation takes the otherwise hidden, sneaky details of reality and utterly transforms them. It’s like taking a sharpie to the external world and aggressively circling certain parts so it becomes impossible not to see them.

Time plays an important factor too. I am both impressed and terrified by the art history course taught by Harvard professor Jennifer L. Roberts. In her piece on the value of immersive attention, Roberts describes the core assignment which requires students “spend a painfully long time looking at [the artwork].” Specifically it must be three hours:

Before doing any research in books or online, the student would first be expected to go […] spend three full hours looking at the painting, noting down his or her evolving observations as well as the questions and speculations that arise from those observations. The time span is explicitly designed to seem excessive. Also crucial to the exercise is the museum or archive setting, which removes the student from his or her everyday surroundings and distractions.

“The Copyists in the Museé Du Louvre” by Louis Béroud (from Artvee)

The lengthy time duration allows the mind to fully take notice of the important information. As Salvatier would say, those pesky details of reality can stay invisible for a long time. Again and again, year after year, students who are initially resistant are turned into believers, “astonished by the potentials this process unlocked”:

It is commonly assumed that vision is immediate. It seems direct, uncomplicated, and instantaneous—which is why it has arguably become the master sense for the delivery of information in the contemporary technological world. But what students learn in a visceral way in this assignment is that in any work of art there are details and orders and relationships that take time to perceive.

[…]

What this exercise shows students is that just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness. Or, in slightly more general terms: access is not synonymous with learning. What turns access into learning is time and strategic patience.

The importance of time is not limited to intellectual domains like fine art or writing either. In an interview on his Japanese carpentry apprenticeship, Jon Stollenmeyer recounts spending four years doing almost nothing. The time and boredom was an essential precursor for deep observation,

For the first four years, most apprentices didn’t really do anything.

In the morning we woke up and went to our boss’s garden. We cleaned it for about thirty minutes. We refilled all the tsukubai, the stone vessels for water. You take all that water and throw it all over the garden, then fill it back up—you’re watering while cleaning. But a big part of that was wiping down everything. All the outside of the building.

That was a part of learning the different woods. Cedar and cypress and pine. Japanese pine and other pines. Cedar from America and cedar from Japan. The wood grain and where each was used. And more and more, you start to see how stuff goes together. You start to see the little details. Because every single day you go to the same house and wipe down the entire thing.

You did it until you were bored, and then you started to randomly see things that you wouldn’t have seen before, because you’re looking past all the stuff you’ve already seen.

Stollenmeyer’s restored 110-year-old house (from New York Times)

It takes me between 2-10 hours to write my blog posts. But these numbers do not include the many hours and days spent in the suspended time between writing, where the mind is observing and digesting the related details of reality. It’s so easy to forget, especially when doing purely intellectual activities, that our bodies also contribute to the effort. There is an unconscious aspect to our observational faculties that take time to bring out.

Writing helps me better perceive the world around me. And the difficulty and time not only come with the territory, but is a fundamental property of being able to synchronize with reality.