{"id":156671,"date":"2020-04-06T12:40:42","date_gmt":"2020-04-06T16:40:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=156671"},"modified":"2020-04-06T20:40:08","modified_gmt":"2020-04-07T00:40:08","slug":"concentration-and-struggle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=156671","title":{"rendered":"Concentration and Struggle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\nI don’t post personally anymore but here’s a personal thing. <\/p>\n

I just submitted two pieces, one of which I’ve been working on for two months. Which means my work began BEFORE I started sheltering-in-place and then had to continue AFTER the reality became clear, and has gone on DURING my sheltering-in-place (and sheltering-in-place has been more of a struggle than I anticipated. I hearten myself by thinking about my ancestors, who faced oppression, persecution, famine, mass immigration, more prejudice, and etc. and so forth. They were tough people. My legacy is tough-ness of spirit, so here I am.) <\/p>\n

The book stack above represents the research I have done since February. I do research like this because it is necessary and because sometimes I have to over-do it in order to have even the smidgeon of confidence to write whatever I’m writing. One of these books here was the lesbian roman \u00e0 clef<\/em>, which was seized by customs in the first week of the quarantine. I wondered if it was seized because it was about lesbians, and thought, “My God, this is like Ulysses all over again.” But then I realized that no, it was just seized because it came from England, and everything was being stopped at the border in those early days of our new reality, which now feels like it was a decade ago. The book showed up at my doorstep a couple of days later. <\/p>\n

In re; the gigantic piece: I pitched the idea to the editor back in December or January. I had come across a little sliver of film history that hadn’t been covered outside of an out-of-print book (not the roman \u00e0 clef<\/em>, another one). I was so intrigued. I knew only vague information about the main subject, although the surrounding context I feel fairly confident I know most everything about (at least in comparison to a layperson). So I thought it would be worth exploring. Come end of January, they took the pitch. They asked for it to be a feature article, as opposed to a regular article, and in the parlance of this particular outlet, feature means 3,000 words, not 1,000. Huge, in other words. They stated the deadline as April 1. Which gave me two months. I of course said “Thank you, will get to work” while inside I thought “Oh shit this is gonna be a race to the finish because I now have a mound of research ahead of me.” Typical Sheila, biting off more than I can chew. <\/p>\n

I set out on my research project, blocking out what I knew I needed to learn in order to write the piece. I bought many of the books in the stack (a couple I already owned). and thank God I did because I couldn’t have gone to the library in the next month (even though I didn’t know it at the time). <\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, after two months, I feel so well-versed in the subject I could probably write an entire 700-page book, complete with 200 pages of footnotes. I’m INSANE.<\/p>\n

I realize my struggles mean very little in comparison to what health care workers are enduring, or people still working in grocery stores or long-distance truckers – all of whom I thank from the bottom of my heart for continuing to work so ALL of us are safe and cared for.<\/p>\n

But I have been struggling with concentration. I live alone and work from home already so – again – I had somehow not anticipated how hard this would be. I MISS MY FAMILY. I MISS MY FRIENDS. I ACHE FOR TOUCH AND HUMAN COMPANY. This has taken up so much more brain space than I thought it would, not to mention really intense worries about … everyone. I know and love many high-risk people. I have four friends – who are not in high-risk groups – who have this virus, and are in the midst of struggling through it at home, monitoring their symptoms and avoiding going to the hospital – as recommended – until the situation becomes dire. Because of course that’s comforting and easy, to think calmly in the middle of the worst sickness of your life, “Okay TODAY is the day I must go to the hospital.” Added on top of this is not just the incompetence but the indifference and cruelty and pettiness<\/i> and, honestly, sinister behavior of the federal government … thank God for the state governors. I look to the governors. I watch only local news, and I tune in only to Cuomo’s press conferences. He has taken the right tone. I have finally become a Federalist in my old age, following in the footsteps of my dead boyfriend. With all of this going on, the mental power it required to write this piece was titanic. It was like training for a prize fight. Or … rolling a boulder up hill, more like. I can’t tell you how much I DIDN’T FEEL LIKE writing this piece, and also like I felt I would not be ABLE to finish the piece, with mental strength so severely diminished. It should go without saying that I am grateful for the work, especially in this era when so many people are losing jobs and outlets\/institutions are collapsing, and writers are losing the few gigs they have. <\/p>\n

I have often wondered if my rigorous acting training – started at a very young age – kicks in when I need to gather my forces and write something as big and as rigorous as this piece. So much of acting training, as well as acting experience, has to do with strengthening your concentration. You cannot be an actor if you don’t have an abnormally devloped power of concentration. Not just for memorizing your lines – but for creating something out of nothing, for the amount of work you have to do (emotional, physical, intellectual) – to just be able to endure a rehearsal process. It’s a marathon not a sprint, although rehearsals do take place in a condensed period of time. You don’t have a 6-month rehearsal period. It can range from 6 weeks to 4 weeks to a week. I had devloped this power of concentration young – 16 or 17 years old when I got my first real role, and it was the lead. I was the youngest person in the cast by far. It wasn’t a high school play, so I went through my senior year of high school with all its academic pressures alongside this RIGOROUS rehearsal process. During that year I learned concentration skills, as well as acting skills – I was already “good at acting” but through this rehearsal process I REALLY learned how to act and craft a performance, and I learned about research and all the concentration that requires, plus making performance choices and nailing those choices down, being able to do the same thing night after night, and etc. This difficult year taught me stuff that helped get me through college, through mid-term weeks, got me through life basically, YEARS before I started writing professionally. <\/p>\n

I got to this writing thing late (outside of my journals) but I already knew how to get my shit together, gather my forces, and sit down and write. Writing (at least for me) takes enormous mental energy. I know I write a lot. And I care a lot about the integrity of what I put out there, here and elsewhere. Writing here is easier somehow. But still: I’m used to focusing my attention. I do not suffer from concentration problems (my attention span has been impacted by social media, which is why I do not have Facebook or Twitter “on my phone” because … I guess I do lack self-control – lol) but I can write for long periods of time. <\/p>\n

I absorbed the books above in a month and a half, taking notes all the while in my weirdo comprehensible-only-to-me system (it involves asterisks, circles, and underlines, all of which mean different things). It was very difficult, particularly once the quarantine came down. I felt like I started to lose momentum once I could no longer leave my apartment. But I pressed on. <\/p>\n

Then I started writing. Normally I block out what I want to write as I go – or at least flag ideas for openings and endings (the hardest part of writing long pieces. I find that picking out the “bookends” as I go helps me with my “way in” to the piece). The “flagging” is part of the asterisk-underline system so I can find it in the reams of notes I write. I write 90% more notes than I ever use. I can’t seem to pare it down! <\/p>\n

Once I started, and starting is the hardest part, I got into “the zone” – the zone of intense and focused concentration, the kind of concentration where you have to force yourself to take a break and eat something. Part of the benefit of doing so much research, of more research than you could ever possibly use in a piece 3,000 words long, is that you have all this information floating around in your head, you’ve absorbed it (I think this again may come from the mental energy and focus I acquired at a young age as an actress, where you have to absorb all this right brain-left brain stuff and KEEP IT IN PLACE), and once you’ve absorbed it it’s there for you to use. A quote will float up, and I’ve asterisk-ed it somewhere so I can find it, or an anecdote will suddenly present itself in my head, something that might illustrate the point I’m trying to make. All of this required a sense of momentum, a push, that once it started it couldn’t be stopped. So maybe it STARTS feeling like I’m pushing a boulder up hill but once I get going it feels like I’m chasing said boulder DOWN the hill. Because this all took place in such a concentrated time, like cramming for exams, I felt like if I “took a break” I would lose the thread altogether, I would lose the shape of the piece, the shape of what I wanted to do. God help me if “the man from Porlock” showed up. Although he couldn’t now what with the lockdown. <\/p>\n

By the end, I barely knew what I had written. It was all a blur. This was even though I had edited it very carefully. I usually edit as I go. I look at each paragraph, reading it out loud, it’s all very painstaking and exhausting. So the shape coheres as I go. Then I get into a rough first draft, and then I go through it again. I read it out loud. I edit. I read out loud again. You catch things that way, awkwardness, repetition. This went on from 8 in the morning until 9 at night. I just can’t seem to schedule it so I do a little bit a day, like a good little student. I got straight A’s “cramming” in college. It’s stressful. But I have stopped questioning it. The whole thing was so single-minded that I passed it in in a whirl of confusion, a kind of “oh fuck it, this is the best I can do, here you go.”<\/p>\n

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I collapsed after I passed it in. I lay in bed, still buzzing with the momentum the piece required. I had to give myself a day to recuperate.<\/p>\n

I didn’t re-read it after I passed it in. I didn’t even want to LOOK at it. I spent the day binge-watching Lovesick<\/i> and indulging in my gigantic crush on Johnny Flynn. As well as missing my friends and family and FaceTiming with literally everyone. <\/p>\n

Finally, a couple days later, I read the piece. And thought “Who the hell wrote this? She really knows her shit. This is really INTERESTING.”<\/p>\n

lol<\/p>\n

It was like it was by someone else. Someone else who HAD HER SHIT TOGETHER. <\/p>\n

Not sure why I put myself through all this drama but it seems part of the gig for me. <\/p>\n

Just to add to the drama: I still thought, as I always think, that I might hear back from the editor with a version of, “Uhm, please re-order the whole thing because it’s not clear at all what you’re doing, and could you please focus more on this whole other aspect and it doesn’t really work as a whole. We’ll give you a day to do another pass at it …” It has happened to me before. Not a lot but a couple of times! I dreaded this. I didn’t know if I could get into the zone again (although of course on another level I knew I could). So I geared up for it. <\/p>\n

Then I got the piece back from the editor, and he had done only minor tweaks in the language, nothing I needed to address. There was only one query from a copyeditor, who caught an error, or it was really just an omission. It was a very good catch. (And this is why the mass layoffs of copyeditors across the land has been such a catastrophe. Writers can only catch so much. Copyeditors are there to save the writer from criticism later on.) So I couldn’t believe the edit I got back: the query took me literally 45 seconds to fix (because, remember, I had all the information I knew I would need all asterisked-underlined-circled, so I could find it easily and pop it in there). <\/p>\n

If all this sounds braggadocious: Among the many things I have ceased caring about in our new world is being perceived as being vain or full of myself. That’s high school shit. I am way too old for that. Not enough time left for that. I have spent years in outright self-loathing. I’ve earned a little bit of pride in what I do.<\/p>\n

I “became” a writer in 2010\/2011, when I got my first paying gig as a critic. And I was the only critic at this outlet, so I covered everything, festivals, new releases, etc. Those years were two of the hardest years of my life (and I now know I was lucky actually to survive them). Under unimaginably strenuous mental circumstances, as the grief of losing my father was still fresh, I was able to get my shit together enough to do this very big job, this very NEW big job, mind you, something I had never really done before, outside my ramblings on this site right here. From the jump at this first gig, I over-did the research. Mainly because I felt I had to prove myself and my seriousness but also because … it’s already just how I do things. If I’m “into” something, I immerse myself in it fully. I have always worked my personal obsessions (Elvis, Dean Stockwell, Supernatural<\/i>, Cary Grant) like a full-time job. So in this new job, I over-researched even just straight reviews. Like my first gig was reviewing the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit<\/i>, so of course I re-watched the original, but I also dug into Charles Portis’ work, so I could get a larger context of what the film adaptations may have changed or altered, and also to do a compare and contrast between the original and the re-make. <\/p>\n

This approach has, in general, been my thing. From the jump I didn’t want to just review the film. I wanted to utilize anything I knew about the subject, and not just the subject but … the world in general. Poetry, history, biography, my vast and eclectic reading through my life … it’s all just THERE. So why not use it. It’s also funner that way. I had this new gig as a critic, and I was new as a critic, and I knew what I DIDN’T know about movies, but I also knew about my lifelong curiosity about things other than film. In truth, I’m curious about other topics MORE than I am curious about film, and one of my goals has always been to bring in those OTHER topics into the topic of film. I’d never maintain interest otherwise!<\/p>\n

This was all relatively automatic for me. I didn’t have to decide consciously to do this. It’s just how I do things. And again, I think it might have to do with the muscle of concentration developed in the pursuit of acting, when I was a kid, that prepared me for what I need to do now.<\/p>\n

The piece will come out next month. It has been dominating me during this weirdo month of self-isolation, and then worry about one of my best friends who came down with this virus hard, and then one more friend got it, and then two more just got it … plus just the newness of not being able to go visit my family, or see my friend Allison, and the research ended up being a blessing. <\/p>\n

But it’s in and I am proud of it since I now have some distance. I did what I set out to create. When I pitched the thing, I had a dream of what it would be. I’m not saying it’s War and Peace<\/em>, come on now. It’s an article. But I had a dream that this subject would be of great interest to others, that this obscure subject, somehow “missed” by film scholarship outside of that out-of-print book I mentioned would fill in an important blank, would maybe even resurrect interest in this THING that I thought people should know more about. (Side note: the out-of-print book I mentioned was leant to me by a friend – Jonathan Goldman. He was the first person I texted once the pitch was accepted, since I knew his expertise in at least the surrounding context of the piece I was going to write. I texted him just for informational purposes, and he sent me a picture of the book, saying “Do you have this?” I did not, and so he kindly leant it to me).<\/p>\n

So I wrote myself into that dream. It’s now manifest. It’s “out” of me now, it’s out of my hands. I can’t describe the relief of having something off my desk and onto someone else’s desk. It’ll soon be out there to be read by people. It will not change the world but I did it. During a time of really intense upheaval and worry.<\/p>\n

And so this is a note on my blog about having a moment of pride in it. And pride in my process which – even with all its drama – works for me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t post personally anymore but here’s a personal thing. I just submitted two pieces, one of which I’ve been working on for two months. Which means my work began BEFORE I started sheltering-in-place and then had to continue AFTER … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156671"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=156671"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":156712,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156671\/revisions\/156712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=156671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=156671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=156671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}