Chris Csont

Living With Attention Debt

I’ve started referring to any dishes left in the sink or on the counter overnight as dish debt. Not only are they just left for my future self to do, but they accumulate interest in the sense that they’re in the way of other things I want to do the next day (i.e. make coffee), or they’re just a little bit grosser than when they were left to sit overnight.

Debt isn’t just monetary, although that kind can loom over a person. Student loan debt. Medical bill debt. Credit card debt. The kind of monetary debt that can follow a person for months, years, or even decades.

There’s attention debt, too. When you add a new person to your Twitter feed. When you make Facebook friends. When you start reading a new blog, or decide to watch a new TV series. When you add an app to your phone that uses push notifications. Actions that you take in one moment that make a commitment toward further actions in the future.

An aspect of all of these forms of debt is that they prevent you from living in the moment. It can aggressively follow you, like knowing that you have a payment to make at the end of the week, so you’d better be careful on what you spend your money on today. It can shift you out of the present moment and make you question your previous choices; make you wonder if you could have done things differently instead of accumulating that debt. Or, in the case of attention debt, you can slip into distraction for periods of time and come out wondering where all the time went.

Attention debt is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The way that you pay off your attention debt can mimic paying off a monetary debt in some ways. If you make small installments, checking your feeds frequently throughout the day, each payment on that debt seems small, but you’re also paying more interest in the time you’re taking away from focused work. If you set aside time to focus on those feeds in a larger, less frequent chunk of time, you do less harm to your focus. You pay less interest.

But sometimes it’s not easy to avoid those impulses. Sometimes it can be overwhelming to try and breeze through everything in a set amount of time and resist that sense that you’re missing out on something. Again, attention debt is taking you out of your present moment by making that sense of missing out even more acute. It’s not merely a sense that there’s more going on outside of your view, but you have a specific list in your head of what you’re not keeping up with. Keeping up with the Joneses isn’t just about appearances and conspicuous consumption now, it’s about keeping pace with your neighbors’ updates. And our neighborhood is ever growing.

I’ve been thinking about how to create a payment plan for attention debt. Things like Email Bankruptcy and Quitting Twitter are just crash diets for the brain. Living debt-free in this sense also means reducing your connection to other people, and that’s not really my goal. We take on debts because there are things of value attached, but with attention debt there’s more room to negotiate the terms.

Evaluating Your Perspective

Sometimes it’s easiest to explain things as a mathematical formula:

Perspective = (Experience * Consideration) + Time

A clear understanding of what’s important to a story is a function not just of personal experience, but time and considered thought. This is one of the reasons I warn college students not to write scripts about college students. They may have fresh, first-hand experience of what they’re writing about, but enough time hasn’t passed to give the story proper consideration.

But there’s more to this formula than the idea that you shouldn’t write about what happened just last weekend. Consider the number of people who sit down to write, but freeze up at the thought that they haven’t lived enough; that their personal experience is insufficient to have anything worth saying.

Look at that formula. A sense that you lack personal experience worth mining can be overcome through time and effort. That’s research. That’s writing and revising. Not every story needs to be about parachuting into occupied territory or barely surviving running with the bulls while hungover. A story about something small and relatable can have a refreshing perspective if the writer can take the time to discover a nuanced approach to the story’s telling.

And some things can’t be directly experienced. You aren’t going to have a chance to experience life on Earth in the year 3652. You weren’t a vampire in Victorian England. But the experiences you do have that can relate to those stories can be enhanced by consideration and time.

There are no set numbers attached to this formula suggesting that after x hours you’ll attain enlightenment, but it does pose a set of questions for a person looking to pursue a story idea:

What have I experienced that relates to this story?
What about those experiences have I examined, and how deeply?
How long have I been living with these experiences and thoughts?

Acting For Writers

I recently stumbled into the opportunity to act in a local production of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys. There’s a lot I could say about the experience, particularly the joy that comes from getting together with other creative people and making something, but I want to hone in on what I learned, as a writer, from this experience acting.

Writer, Your Words Will Be Taken As Gospel

Actors will struggle to make sure to do your words justice if particular lines speak to them. They will wrestle with inflection, motivation, and the precise order of words.

And, in conversation with each other, they will praise the writing. They will adore it and speak lovingly of it, even as it gives them such grief to master it.

Actors will dig for answers. If you haven’t spelled out a detail to the character’s life that they think is essential to the performance, they will look for clues in what you’ve provided on the page and extrapolate. Reward their curiosity by suggesting a rich, inner life for each and every character and they’ll repay you many times over.

Writer, Your Words Will Be Ignored

I had a role where there were many stage directions to sigh. I ignored them all. Where the scene direction didn’t fit the stage or the performers or the moment, it was ignored.

One particular moment that stood out to me: The direction accompanying my line said that I should look to the heavens in despair. I looked down instead. There was no deep motivation behind my action. It was just more comfortable and natural to my sense of the character.

Those lines that the actor feels are sacred? That’s part of the character. They have to live and breathe as this person for the performance, so everything they do needs to make sense while in character. Anything they trip over either needs to be interrogated until it makes sense, or it’s thrown out. If it’s a moment that’s inessential to the story, it’s more likely to be thrown out.

Writer, Your Words Will Become Inside Jokes

The number of people who take part in any production, be it for stage or screen, are going to hear and see the same things multiple times. And there will be moments when they’re not actively working. These people have one definite thing in common: The production they’re working on at the moment.

Lines from the production will creep into everyday vocabulary. Words you intended for a specific purpose for your characters will come out of the mouths of any number of people, turned into a micro-meme. And this will lead the people working on the show to interact and find what else they have in common. Your words are a catalyst for events outside of the dramatic scenario.

Writer, Your Characters Are Waiting For You

In the best of circumstances (and it felt this production was particularly fortunate in this circumstance), there are clear connections between actor and character. There are aspects of themselves they can bring into the fiction, and places where there’s a bleed between the story and reality.

And in the best of circumstances, the actors will feel grateful to the writer for giving them the opportunity to explore and share that portion of themselves through the conduit of the story.

If your story isn’t finished; if you haven’t gotten it out into the world, know that there are people impatiently waiting for someone to tell their story. Don’t leave them hanging.

Write Down Your Bad Ideas

I had a bad idea this morning over breakfast. A ridiculous bad idea that started out from a fun high-concept premise, but that I found to have a variety of potential plot holes and red flags.

I added it to my idea notebook anyway.

Bad ideas can become good ideas over time. You may eventually come across solutions to the problems you see in the idea and want to run with it. Or, part of this idea might fit better with something else you come up with. A bad idea can still be stripped for parts.

But some bad ideas will stay bad ideas. There’s nothing wrong with that. By writing it down, you already know you’ve had that bad idea before. You can see the problems you had with it. The idea gets out of your head and into a more tangible place where you can look it over a little more objectively.

It’s good to make reasoned judgements about what stories to take from idea to execution, but that same filter can stifle your creativity if you apply it too early in the process. Keep that idea notebook (or app) handy. Fill it up. Get everything out of your head, no matter if you know for certain you can use it.

All your characters are going to die

Just maybe not during your story.

How do they feel about that? Do they think about it at all? Is it a constant fear? Is it something they acknowledge but don’t strongly internalize?

What do they think death is? Do they see it as an end? A beginning? A transition in a cycle?

Where do they define death? Is it clinical, or is there some kind of loss that to them seems close enough to count as death?

What they think of death, or if they think of death, has a profound impact on how a character makes decisions. This isn’t just about stories that deal with death outright. Just because a character isn’t racing to complete a bucket list or facing imminent annihilation from an alien horde doesn’t mean their feelings on death don’t play in to how they live.