Here, I write about sustained attention as a creative practice and a way of living.
Not mindfulness or productivity hacks, but the kind of focus where transformation actually happens—usually around hour three of working, when you’ve pushed past the surface into something stranger and more real.
Like: have you ever browsed the web in a dream? I haven’t. Which makes me wonder if digital life registers as actual experience at all, or some strange limbo our psyches can’t even digest into dream material.
I share things that reveal what we’re trading away. The woman walking her dog while watching a video on her phone. How corporate life systematically eliminates the conditions for flow states while claiming to want innovation. Why the really good sentence often feels like nothing when you write it, but poetry understands that attention is sacred.
I explore what’s worth doing versus what’s merely optimizable. Why physical books matter. Why choosing obsolete practices are essential. Why transformation requires sustained focus, not life hacks. Whether the things we spend our days on are worthy of our dreams.
Each essay concludes with The Understory, a collective area to share works-in-progress. My book Deep Freewriting offers a method for sustained creative work—the principles behind writing for hours at a time, how to build momentum, and what happens when you push past the comfortable surface.
I also work one-on-one with writers and makers who want to develop their practice. Reach out if you’d like to explore working together.
An exercise in noticing
Try this: Spend 20 minutes writing from direct observation. Describe everything in the room you’re in right now—textures, light, sounds, the quality of air. You can interpret, but return to noticing. See what your attention reveals when you give it the directive to linger.
What you’re joining
TMMW is personal narrative that opens into cultural criticism. Writing about creativity by being in the process. Observational, philosophical, sometimes ornery.
If you make things, or if you suspect that life itself might be a creative act, this is for you.
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—Stephen