Too little
The approving glance
The overall effect pleases me, so it must be finished.
A consequential detail passes unnoticed.
Attentiveness
The bird is splendid. Its spare leg has escaped the general review.
A considerate readiness to notice what merits attention.
Attentiveness gives a consequential detail its due. In creative work, a mark, pause, join or change of tone can alter the whole experience. Attend closely enough to notice what the detail does, then decide whether to develop, change or keep it. The aim is a more exact encounter with the work, not suspicion of every irregularity.
Attentiveness gives care for the detail that changes the experience
Your bird drawing has a fine beak, a proud chest and three penciled legs. The extra leg arrived so quietly that you admired the whole picture twice without meeting it. You slow down, follow the lines and erase the spare landing gear. The bird still has its peculiar personality. One small correction has made that personality easier to see.
Finding the balance in Attentiveness
An illustrative everyday situation
Notice and revise a small mark that changes what the viewer sees.
A fitting response
Looking at what is there
Which line is doing what here?
You discover and revise the mark that changes the reading.
Pursued too far
Suspicion of every mark
Any irregularity proves the whole piece is inadequate.
Inspection destroys proportion and obscures the work’s life.
A small mark can have a large job.
When the situation changes
You intended a fantastical three-legged bird. Then the third leg may belong. Attend to whether the drawing makes that invention clear rather than correcting it to a rule it never meant to follow.
What Attentiveness makes possible
You can recognize a detail worth protecting as well as one needing correction. A silence may hold a scene together; a slight asymmetry may give a figure life. Attentiveness allows deliberate preservation instead of automatic tidying.
Attentiveness in ordinary life
A line spoken aloud
Listen to where a sentence places its emphasis. Move a word if the important turn has disappeared.
A final connection
Look at how two panels or sections meet. A small transition can change the relation the audience understands.
Nearby virtues, different work
Diligence
Diligence returns to the necessary work. Attentiveness makes that work sensitive to what is actually present.
Integrance
Integrance considers the fidelity of the whole account. Attentiveness notices particulars that the whole must answer to.
Attentiveness and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: Fault hunting
Searching only for defects is a counterfeit of Attentiveness. Genuine attention also discovers what deserves to stay.
Counterfeit: Fussy correction
Changing details simply because you can may counterfeit Attentiveness. Ask what the alteration does for the experience.
How to cultivate Attentiveness
Choose one dimension to notice: line, sound, spacing or transition.
Follow it through a small section without rushing to judge.
Change a consequential detail, or deliberately preserve one that serves the work.
Try it today
Close attention can use adapted tools, another person’s description or a different pace. Sensory acuity is not a measure of character.
Look or listen closely to a manageable section of your work. Identify one detail that changes the effect. Test an adjustment if needed, then return to the whole to judge it.
In a diplomatic conversation
Attend to the detail that changes the whole impression.
Questions worth returning to
What have I admired too quickly to notice?
Which small feature is doing more than I first thought?
Keep the practice proportionate
Close attention can use adapted tools, another person’s description or a different pace. Sensory acuity is not a measure of character.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
Attend early to the tone and character of the various instruments; try to impress their peculiar sound on your ear.
Schumann directs a musician toward the particular character of each instrument. Attention discovers the differences through which an intended effect becomes audible, complementing this page’s visual example.
Every object that presents itself is to him a lesson.
Reynolds imagines a painter watching faces, streets and fields. Attention gives ordinary surroundings a chance to change the work.
Only to see him pick out a light action in a man’s life, or a mere word that does not seem to amount even to that, is itself a whole discourse.
Montaigne admires Plutarch’s eye for telling particulars. A small detail can carry more meaning than its size suggests.
He has much to discover; and his best way of discovering it is to think long over few things, and watch them earnestly.
Ruskin recommends concentrated study of a few engravings. Remaining with one work can reveal relationships that a rapid survey misses.
the whole value of your careful drawing of the reflections may be lost by your admitting a single false curve of ripple from a wild duck's breast.
Ruskin explains how a ripple affects the reading of reflected water. A small feature deserves attention when it changes the viewer’s understanding of the larger scene.
as by throwing up a feather in the air we know which way the wind blows, better than by a more heavy matter.
Reynolds uses this comparison for the revealing character of artistic ornament. A seemingly minor detail can disclose the direction of a larger design.
On the contrary, unless you know plenty about the natural form that you are conventionalising, you will not only find it impossible to give people a satisfactory impression of what is in your own mind about it, but you will also be so hampered by your ignorance, that you will not be able to make your conventionalised form ornamental.
Morris warns that stylization still needs observation. Even a simplified bird benefits from noticing how its parts belong together.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the fourteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. Begin with a piece you want to make.