Three Days' Focus Interlude: Who is my audience?

Writers produce more effective writing when they keep their audience in mind. Well, more specifically, when they write to the audience. My goal is to produce effective writing. If I’m going to do this, I must not only write with plenty of voice, edit myself to have effective use of conventions, etc., but must also write to the audience.

The thing is that my goal with the “Three Days’ Focus” personal improvement plan and the accompanying editorials is, well, to learn to focus. So, it seems to me that, rather than just saying “I’m trying to write in a good journalistic style” or “I’m writing to anyone who likes to read introspective literature,” I think that I should write to a specific person, whether real or imaginary.

So, what is the appeal in doing this? Frankly, I think that it’s an appeal of personal taste. Consider how historically exciting it is when one reads what Lincoln wrote to his wife, or your mother to your father in old love letters. You get to put yourself immediately in the personal and empathetic mindset of reading. It’s similar to how much popular intrigue books like Harry Potter have. In these books, seemingly half the literature is dialogue. Reading plays, too, is exciting; the reader can picture him/herself in the scene. “Open letter to [some person]”-type literature (Morris’s “Open Letter to a Christian Nation,” and Living Colour’s “Open Letter to a Landlord” are powerful examples of this medium. I’m going to try, for a while, to write thus. So, for example, and I’m not sure at this point who the particular audience member will be, you might see a passage like:

Therefore, Marvin (Marvin is my M&M dispenser), the reason that I have decided to make the next three days’ focus project a song to my grandma is because….

Or, perhaps, I don’t need to name the person out loud (figuratively speaking). Perhaps, as the writer, I simply need to keep that person in mind.

It’s important to note, however, that I‘m not writing this way because of someone, as Dante wrote the Divine Comedy because he couldn’t get over his obsession with Beatrice; I’m not writing to a muse. I’m writing this for myself to a particular person so that that person might know me. Johnnny Rzeznik, in the iconic pop rock hit “Iris,” wrote “I don’t want the world to see me/Cuz I don’t think that they’d [sic] understand/When everything’s made to be broken/I just want you to know who I am.” In this exercise, you could say that I’m writing of my personal progress to this particular audience member in order to build the relationship. This isn’t a method of persuasion; it’s a method of relationship- and self-building.

So, who is my addressee?

I feel that it would be very short-sighted, or at least potentially trivial, to write to a love interest. More to the point, I think that it would be hard to resist the urge to impress a love interest. I think that there is a part of me that is a teenage boy who is willing, potentially, to do almost anything kosher in order to get the sweet-smiling, kind, confident girl to notice him… A guy is likely to do things out of character just to seem cool or unique. For me, I’d rather stay true to myself and make more of a conscious effort to produce quality content than to stumble onto quality content by accident. I think that I’m more likely to impress a love interest if I do the best that I can at what I do… this blog, appropriately, being a potential part of that. Yay, me!

Picking a person gives me pause. It feels like a very powerful choice. Jumping off of a cliff is easier with a battle cry. The selection of my addressee is my battle cry.

Do I write to someone famous who can help me to achieve my dreams by giving me advice from his/her success? If I did, I’d probably write to Charlie Daniels, Johnny Rzeznik and Alice Cooper because some combination of their music is probably something like I would/will write. But, that’s not really my style. I prefer to try to do the little things right and let success follow from there.

This isn’t getting me anywhere. It looks like I’ve fallen into the trap of over-thinking myself and nearly falling into the secondary, and worse, inaction trap. I’m not going to let myself fail. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll compromise with myself that I’ll not be married to this choice… If I change my mind later, I’ll roll with it. So, here I go…

I’m now writing this blog to my siblings.

The reasons are too many to count, but the biggest one is that my mom has two wishes for us, her children. I can’t honor one of them, but I will do my best to honor the second, and that is that my siblings and I should be friends. In order to be friends with people, they have to know you. Here goes. To “yuce guys,” this blog’s for you. It’s to you.

To those of you who’re kind enough to listen in, you’re welcome here, indeed invited. Hopefully, this audience selection makes your read better from now on.

Brain Shower

This entry was delayed by the death and burial of my grandmother, a very special woman to whom I was very close.

The last three days’ focus was to work on a poem.

Result: I enjoyed the brainstorming stage of writing the poem. I’m technically still in the brainstorming stage. When I began with my three-days’-focus series, I promised myself that I would not be too hard on myself for an unfinished project. And to that I hold.

The trouble, for me, in any creative work, is that, sometimes, I just have to make a choice, and I cannot expect every choice to be perfect. I pursue perfection, yet I know that I won’t achieve it.

The question for me will become, when I make it past the brainstorming stage, can I come up with something coherent that says what I want to say.

The next three days’ focus project: work on exercises that are in my piano book. I took four years of lessons at KWU, and, I’ll admit, I never really practiced. I think that I passed because my instructor was more interested that I understand the concepts of playing… that, and, at least during my lessons, I was able to do what she wanted me to do. At the time that I was a music major at KWU, the program was still building and solidifying. Does this excuse my lack of proficiency? No, certainly not. I was more concerned with my class attendance (the skill of commitment-keeping) and my emotional growth, social growth, and involvedness than I was with actually building skills. College, it seems, for me was a 3.75-year foray into learning how to think… I recount with embarrassment how it always seems like I know a fair amount of things, but I can do hardly anything.

There is a difference between intelligence and smartness. To illustrate this, I go back to a conversation with one of my college instructors. This conversation took place about six months ago. The professor said to me, in a tone of comfort (necessary because I was coping with mistreatment at the time), that I was “pretty smart,” and at, at the time, this didn’t make sense to me. “Pretty smart? I’ve had people complimenting my intelligence all my life! You’re just downplaying it because I’m not good at what you do, because I don’t have the skills and didn’t succeed all that much.” It was moronic to think this… Perhaps, if I’d had guts and said this thought out loud, I might’ve learned faster the difference that I now understand. This particular instructor is also a coach, and the activity that he coaches requires not that people be intelligent, but that they be smart. Smartness, then, is intelligence in action. By this definition, I’m not very smart. I have the intelligence to learn smarts, but I need to focus and practice in order to obtain these smarts.

As far as being a musician goes, it’s quite embarrassing to sit down at a piano and not be able to do what my brain wants done. I have many of the piano concepts in my head, but that only makes me intelligent. It doesn’t make me piano-smart. I’m going to spend the next three days, starting tomorrow because tonight I’m covering a high school football game on the radio, working rather hard to build some piano smarts. They say that it takes about 10,000 hours of commitment to master something… I’m going to see if I can make it at least 15 hours closer to piano mastery.

Clutter Confrontation

Talk abou’chr floor space! Check this action out!

A moderate success in the second three days' focus project

My second three days’ focus project was to focus on arranging my room.

Report: I made considerable progress on the first day, and then didn’t accomplish anything the next two days. I did show off my progress to my housemate and his girlfriend, though. *sticks tongue out to the side obnoxiously*

How I progressed: This box of random j-u-n-q-u-e sat behind the door to my bedroom. Having sorted through it, I was able to play a game of rearrange-the-squares-to-make-the-picture in my room. I don’t have much shelf space, but I changed what I kept on the shelf and put storage containers closer together, near my closet. The end result is that I can now walk freely into my room. I can see my desk completely, there are probably 24 square feet of free floor space now, and I have easy access to my piano keyboard.

Looking forward, now, to the next three days: I will be celebrating my nephew’s first birthday tomorrow (Eight hours of driving are involved.), and I’m directing my church choir in the morning, so I’ll lose an entire day of progress (for a good reason.)

Unless…

I work on a poem.

I’ve realized that the beauty of poetry is, in part, that every word is carefully chosen. And, even though one can sit there, putting his/her thoughts in lines and rhyme words at the ends of those lines, there isn’t any depth, any gravity, to the work other than simple conversational idea communication. So, I think that my thoughts, pensamientos, need to be more carefully considered when I write poetry. My next three days’ focus project is to work on a poem dealing with the concept of how some things will never be. I will search for ways to express the profundities of what “neverness” means. The choosing of the right words should involve lots of brainstorming, structuring, and careful consideration. I don’t expect to “finish” the poem, but, perhaps, I’ll make a good start.

Crunch Time

The first three days’ focus ends, the new one pondered.

The first three days’ focus didn't turn out as well as it should've, but it is also wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. The reality is that I managed to do core exercises each of the three days. I’m putting that one in the win column.

Predictably, or, to be honest, what I should’ve hypothesized would be a result, was that, in focusing on one thing for several days, I found myself more motivated to do other things. For example, I was thinking about making sure that I worked on my core muscles, yet I also started thinking about a yard project, read another 60 or so pages of a book, kept the kitchen clean, and wrote some more brainstormed ideas for a book that I’d like to write. So, if nothing else, these three days’ focus projects may set me up for continued success in doing all of the little things right. Heck, I even did some more thinking about a barbershop arrangement that I hope to write.

The question now becomes “What do I focus on for these next three days?” I think that I have my answer, and the answer comes from noticing inconveniences in my work-out time. I tend to not work out when I feel confined by space. Scratch that. I tend not to do ANY work when I’m confined or when there is the slightest hindrance to working on a project. My room, you see, is not very open because I have too much clutter. Clutter, though, is a problem not easily dealt with… For me, at least. I have found that I don’t like to start a project unless I can stay with it and get it completed. And, I don’t like to take things out of containers (I should have noted earlier that these containers contain all of the stuff that I describe as clutter; I’ve gotten better at not leaving clutter out in the open.

So, my conclusion is that the three days’ focus for Wednesday through Friday is going to be working on that stack of storage buckets so that I have more openness in my bedroom. Heck, maybe I’ll even do a few core exercises along the way if the principle of being more motivated to do other things while I work on a principle project continues to hold true. Turn on the music, Self, you’ve got three days of hard work ahead of you. Rock on.

Three Days’ Focus

Nothing like Orwell’s "Two Minutes Hate"

I called a friend of mine last night. He’s a visual artist. He’s got a sweet set-up in Lawrence, a little one bedroom apartment where he can produce, enjoy, and discover creative works. I wanted to ask him how he manages to focus on projects, get things done.

Somehow, though, it seems that the simple fact of calling him and thinking it out loud gave me an idea… well, that, and I went for a slow country drive. I took some Oreos with me. In any case, I called him because he seemed to be a person who could relate to my intentions. You see, there’re all sorts of projects that I want to do, poems that I want to write, songs, arrangements, physical conditioning, audio recordings, blogging, language learning. I feel like my problem is motivational and focus-related.

It’s like, once I get into a project, I can while away the hours and get a lot done, having a lot of fun and feeling in the zone. Yet, I tend to waste time just staring around the house trying to make up my mind what I’m going to do.

So, here’s what I came up with. I’m going to focus on one project at a time. It’s going to be an intense 3-day focus of each project. If I get it done, great; if I don’t, that’s ok, too.

I’ve arrived at this idea because I’ve noticed that I got a lot more done when I have something demanding on which to focus. When I was reading a book recently, I felt that all that I wanted to do was to finish the book. It seemed that I could focus super hardcore for a couple of days. I’d like to build up my focus ability, though. So, I think that three days of focus presents a good challenge. Here goes. First project: physical conditioning. Working on the core muscles for the next three days. Game on. 365 days in a year, so 121 projects to complete. If I do 121 projects, it should be a helluva year.