The Writer's Eye

If you’ve been to a local amateur baseball field of any size, you’ve likely noticed advertisements strung along the outfield fence: painted plywood sheets or vinyl banners fixed to the chain link identifying the local hardware store/brewery/screen print shop/auto repair/tech support/personal injury lawyer who’ve paid a modest fee to be so present. Beyond that fence, there is whatever there is: more park, a set of railroad tracks, buildings or houses rising up. At professional parks, circumstances are somewhat different; usually the outfield wall itself is free of ads (and perhaps slightly padded, if the team feels some kindness toward its outfielders), but there’s often an out-of-town scoreboard either directly behind or very slightly above the field of play. Higher up, you might find party decks, specialty restaurants, water features, elaborate small landscaping projects, exuberant sculptures of marine life1. Somewhere out there, there’s a videoboard the size of a small planet. Most certainly the outfield will filled with banks of seats and the people in them. In sum, the outfield is a visually noisy place, and it is into this noise that the hitter stares.

To compensate, most fields will create a blank, dark backdrop in straightaway center to allow the batter a better view of the incoming pitch. On the local level, that might simply mean plain plywood or vinyl in some dark color fixed to the fence. A good hunter green is popular. If the field has the resources, that backdrop—called the batter’s eye—might rise well above the level of the rest of the fence, too. At Coors Field in Denver, there’s a rocky fountain ringed with evergreens and native plants sitting behind the center field fence, and that’s all backdropped with a deep green wall covered over with ivy. Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park has a red brick wall, also covered in a rising blanket of ivy, behind a modest collection of shrubbery.2

Why all this painting and landscaping beyond the actual field of play? Because it’s impossible to do the work if you can’t see the work. In this baseball example, it’s a literal consideration. Against a white sign in the outfield or a sea of multicolored t-shirts, an incoming pitch is as good as invisible; a swing is as good as a guess. A clearer mechanism for sight allows the hitter to make a better, more considered decision about swinging (even in this split second, it’s a choice), which is to say when and how to expend their effort and when to make the most of their circumstances.

The same sentiment applies to writing. Sometimes a clarification of the workspace is what’s needed: reducing the piles of books and notes around the laptop or the notebook so that there aren’t physical distractions from the task at hand. Those physical objects can also be a mental distraction: it’s hard to concentrate on revising your own chapter if you’re also staring at the book you’re supposed to review or blurb or prepare for class.

It’s not a case of letting one task erase the other, but rather simplifying the backdrop for each thing. When it’s time to read for the blurb, don’t also leave your own chapter sitting open on your screen. The constant push-pull of “Oh, I should do X” leads so swiftly to doing shockingly little, and without even the pleasure of deliberately skiving off and treating yourself to the hammock nap or the pie-baking or the Diablo IV3 binge.

The reason I’m thinking about all of this right now is because I am in dire need of a batter’s eye of my own.

I’m even experiencing it with my spinning. I generally spin quite fine, and I often struggle to get a good view of my fiber against my own leg or against the dark wood of the floor and the lighter wood of my spinning wheel and the splay of whatever else is sitting behind it all. At the spinning wheel, though, this is a problem solved easily enough with a pair of old pillowcases, one light, one dark. I choose the color most different from whatever I’m spinning, and then, draped across my lap, the fabric both hides the visual noise of other textures behind the fiber and creates a clear enough contrast that I can keep the consistency of thickness and twist.

At the writing level, I’ve tried clearing my desk, tidying up as much of my in-room sight-line as possible. I’ve tried methods I’ve never had success with before, like doing the small tasks first in hopes that the little boost of serotonin from making some incremental progress will fuel the larger and also making the total number of things on the to-do list smaller, which should theoretically lead to seeing the bigger pieces more clearly. It doesn’t and it hasn’t.4 

I’ve gone the self-care route, opting for sleeping in and then letting myself putter. The hope that letting myself think about nothing of note will give everything a chance to settle has thus far been futile. Brain as a jar of shaken-up puddle-water feels apt, but if the metaphor was accurate, the method would work better.

I have to go back to the batter’s eye: it works because the batter in that moment, looking at that backdrop, is only looking for one thing. There is only one task, and if the batter is going to be successful, each at-bat must be completed in the present moment. Worrying about anything that came before—the strike-out, the would-be home run foul by inches, the failed bunt attempt—or anything that comes after—a win, more playing time, a contract extension—interferes with the present moment, and the present moment requires all of the self.

As a writer with a novel forthcoming, I’m so bound up in the past and the future, the what-ifs and the maybes, I’m missing the present. (Better put: I’m wasting the present.) So I’m doing my best to center myself with small things: responding to two other people’s amazing manuscripts has reminded me of the wonder of the process. I properly studied the responses a friend had to one of my stories in progress and saw its path more clearly. I’m turning to paper and jettisoning screens as much as I can. I’m turning on my Forest app and letting my love for these stupid pixel trees keep me off of Twitter. The view’s not clear, but maybe it’s clearing.

What do you do when you need to simplify your own view of things?

Thank you for reading Loomings. If you are enjoying this post, please share it!

Some small good things:

This sentence by Ursula K. Le Guin, from Lavinia:

This is my first time reading Lavinia, and I’m so taken by Le Guin’s approach to the story: a character aware of herself as a character and aware of the blank space made of her by Virgil’s Aeneid. It adds a vivacity and charm to the narration; it also works in the same way formal constraints might. By being aware of certain boundaries she faces as a character—what is already known of her—what she does inside of those boundaries feels all the more pointed. So when there are long passages of world-building and careful considerations of more minor characters even within that defined space, it seems all the more deliberate. Of course it’s all deliberate—Le Guin wills it so—but in the first-person voice of Lavinia, there’s a considered texture to it that invokes the reader’s need to trust the teller of the tale.

The Wigleaf Top 50 is out! This is a fabulous festival of flash fiction gems that includes many writers I adore and some names that are new to me. Delight in these reading pleasures; since each piece is so short, keep the tab open in your phone for when you’re in line at the post office or waiting for your toast to pop.

The black raspberries5 are ripening here in central Pennsylvania, and I found a new patch of raspberry brambles on the edge of our property, surrounded by a thicket of multiflora rose, and growing over the old brush-pile left by the linesmen cleaning up around the power lines. This is to say one must tread carefully and dress heavily, but the rewards are tremendous.