The Writing Superpower You're Not Using: Boredom

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 41, did you know that you have a writing superpower that you're probably not using? On today's podcast, we're talking about the awesome power of boredom.

Introduction to Boredom's Power

Now let's get started. Okay, before we jump in, I wanna warn you that I may sound like an old man at times during this podcast. There are going to be some good old-fashioned back-in-my-day stories, so be prepared for that. With that in mind, I wanna start with an experience I had going back to college to become a teacher. This was probably about 2014.

So I took a class in teaching college on the psychology of adolescence. One of the textbooks we used was an old, like pre-internet old, and one of the chapters was all about how important boredom was for the formation of the adolescent mind and how important it was for the exploration and discovery of one's unique identity. So back then, teens spent countless hours basically just kind of alone in their rooms, bored and thinking. Contemplating who they were and the world around them. They could throw themselves into books or take long walks without the benefit of music or a podcast in their ears. When they couldn't sleep, they'd just kind of lie awake, bored and thinking.

Car rides with nothing but the radio to break the silence during long hours in the backseat. The thesis of this part of the textbook was that time, this forced boredom, was absolutely vital for these young humans to figure out who they were, what they wanted to do with their lives, and how they saw the world. That kind of unscheduled solitude wasn't just downtime, it was identity formation.

Boredom and Identity Formation

Now if this were a podcast on psychology, I'm sure we could explore what's been lost and how much of our cultural identity crisis has grown from this lack of boredom and introspection that we're shielded from now as a society. We've got our constant boredom-killing technology, right? But this isn't a psychology podcast, so we're going to explore what does this have to do with writing.

So if you're a writer, that kind of introspection is still essential. You don't just write stories, you write your stories. And to do that, you have to kind of know what matters to you, right? What images haunt you, what questions keep tugging at the edges of your brain. And you can't find those answers while you're doom scrolling, right? And trust me, I'm as guilty of that as anyone.

Those kind of answers come in the quiet, introspective, and yes, even boring moments that we all try like hell to avoid. So here's story number two. It was the middle of summer, so I'm maybe seven or eight years old, and there are five stations on the television, right? Other than Saturday mornings, almost none of them showed anything for kids. There's no cable TV yet. There's not even VCRs.

The internet is a long ways in the future, not even imagined at this point. So my brothers and I would be bored stiff. Now we had, you know, the occasional soccer practice or maybe a trip to the movies, but other than that, there was just nothing structured to do. We didn't have screens, just a long stretch of hot afternoons.

So we ended up inventing things, right? Not on purpose. We just didn't have any other option other than, you know, to complain to our parents about how bored we were, which we did a lot.

So I remember one day we reimagined our basement into an entire medieval kingdom. We built a throne room, right? We got out all the pillows and blankets and stacked books up and everything. And one of us, it always seemed to be my older brother, reigned over the rest of us as our king. Right.

So we did, we did this every day for what seemed like weeks. Maybe it was just a few days, but in my memory, it was weeks. The rest of us, other than my brother, who was the king, were knights, right? Sent on impossible missions into the other rooms of the other kingdoms or upstairs or even out into the wild lands of our backyard. There were dragons. Um, there were betrayals.

There were secret scrolls, ancient swords. It was thrilling. It was life and death adventure. And in our minds that had all the depth and suspense of a Tolkien novel, right? Amazing times, amazing memories that we had.

Another time, this is going to sound so nerdy, uh, because I'm sure it was. We gathered every single stuffed animal we could find in the house and every figurine, like any little figurine statue sort of thing. We gathered them all and we brought them all down into the basement.

So anything that could be kind of imagined to be alive and have a personality, we brought down into the basement and we set them all up and had a massive election for president of the house. I know super nerdy. Uh, so my brothers and I each picked our candidates. Uh, we gave speeches for them in front of the gathered masses and held a massive vote where everyone in attendance was represented. We'd go through and become each of these stuffed animals, each of these figurines and give our reasons for how we were going to vote. And, uh, you know, as I think about it, my older brother, not only was he always the King, Uh, but it seemed like his candidates always won as well.

The system might've been rigged now that I think back on it, but this whole process took hours and hours and we were all in, I mean, 100% engaged. We were inventing issues that we had to deal with and the personalities of the different stuffed animals and figurines. And we were inventing opportunities for how we could improve this small little world we'd created.

Now, yes, super nerdy thing to do. I can't argue with that, but was it creative? Was it original? Absolutely right. And it was driven 100% by sheer utter boredom. And I could tell a hundred other stories about the other things we created during those years.

And I often do when I'm sitting around with my brothers, but the best part, all of them grew from nothing. It all grew from being utterly and completely bored. Now I want you to think back to, or maybe you are younger than me. Probably you're younger than me at, uh, try to imagine being a kid during this time, not during school or structured activities, but those long lazy afternoons when you're sprawled on the carpet, staring at the ceiling, there's no phones. There's no internet. You're just there.

Internet's there's no internet. You're just there with your meandering thoughts. And maybe laying under the coffee table suddenly became a spaceship, right? Or maybe you invented entire worlds from the patterns in the carpet that you were laying on. If you've got stories like that, I'd love it if you'd share some of those bored kid inventions over at the page for this episode at our website. I'll give you the link a little bit later on, but I'd love to hear from you.

Some of your, uh, boredom inspired creativity, especially when you were a kid. So that was boredom and it was glorious, right? Now we didn't think it was glorious at the time. In fact, we whined about it constantly to our parents. I'm bored. I'm bored.

There's nothing to do, right? Nothing worth doing. But eventually our imaginations would kick in. And once they did, they swept us away.

Boredom as a Creative Tool

Now we didn't know at the time, but those times of boredom were required to reveal the creativity and imagination bubbling just under the surface. Our brains unoccupied by scrolling or swiping. They turned inward, right? They wandered, they wondered, they created stories. The thing is today we never have to be bored. We can fill every empty second with something music, text messages, podcasts like this one, videos.

I mean, even standing in line at the grocery store comes with a side of TikTok, right? Think about your reaction when you find yourself, you know, waiting in a doctor's office or when a commercial comes on the TV. I know because I'm the same way, right? And everybody else is too. Just look around in those moments and you'll see that almost everybody is on their phone trying to fill in any of the smallest moments of boredom that we might have.

Now for writers, this is a massive problem. Creativity needs space. It needs emptiness to echo into. When your brain is always consuming someone else's content, you don't have time to hear your own voice, to think your own ideas that aren't colored by the nonstop firehose of content coming in. Boredom isn't the enemy of productivity. It's the birthplace of insight.

When you're bored, your brain enters what psychologists call the default mode network. Now I'll link to more info on this in the show notes over at the show's website if you want to dive deeper into it. But this is basically the part of your brain that lights up when you're daydreaming, reflecting, connecting dots.

In other words, it's where storytelling begins. All right, one more story from my college years and then I'll be done with those. I promise.

So we were in a unit on learning how to teach students to be better readers. And just out of curiosity, I asked my peers in the class, my fellow soon-to-be teachers, how they first fell in love with reading, right? This was a class just for English teachers, so we were all voracious readers. And I was just curious, right? How did we become these voracious readers that we are? And as people shared their stories, something really interesting came to light.

Every single one of them had the same origin story. They were bored, right? One of them told a story about how sitting for her about being a student in their English class. And the teacher would set aside 10-20 minutes of every single day for personal choice reading.

So they had to come up with a book of their choosing. And they sat there in their desks without their phones on, obviously, because you're in school. No music playing, nothing. You sat there with a book. And this person just talked about how that just felt like absolute torture to do that, right? Like it was a prison sentence to just sit there with a book of all things.

Well, eventually, with nothing else to do, they opened that book and started reading a little bit of it and finally found a book that hooked them, drew them in, and opened up this world of reading. Another one talked about losing their phone privileges as a kid. Right? They'd gotten in trouble, took the phone away, you're grounded, you can't do anything. And there were books there. They picked up a book and it all started there.

Every single story of people in this class, the love of reading was born out of boredom. They had nothing else to do, no endless content to scroll on their phones. And for some reason, maybe it was a sibling's book lying around, maybe it was something they found in a corner, somewhere they picked up a book and that was it. That was the spark.

In other words, stillness led them to stories. And that's not just true for readers. It's just as true for writers. We discover who we are as writers the same way we discover who we are as readers in moments of boredom. when your brain is finally quiet enough to pay attention to the stories swirling around inside it.

So here's the wild thing. We have become almost afraid of being bored. Like it's some crazy, unnatural state. Like we have to fix it immediately with a scroll, a swipe, some kind of distraction. We're starting to see boredom as a kind of torture to be avoided at all costs.

But here's the thing. The history of human beings is boredom. Massive, all-encompassing, perpetual boredom interrupted only sporadically by action or maybe entertainment, right? Think back to these evolutionary eras of the human hours and hours reaping and sowing, right? Out in the fields. You're not being entertained.

You're not listening to a podcast. You have nothing in your ears, right? You're doing a monotonous task and your mind is spinning, right? It's inventing. It's creating. It's thinking deeply.

Or, you know, days walking behind herds or tracking prey, right? Hours and hours of monotony with nothing else to fill it. That is the history of what it means to be human, right? Seasons spent just watching the fire, right? There's not much else to do. We're going to sit around and keep warm around the fire.

Long stretches of silence with nothing but your thoughts and maybe the sound of the wind in the grass. And you know what came from that? Myth grew out of that. Music grew out of that. The use of tools grew out of that. Language grew out of that, right?

Incredibly, incredibly creative state of mind to be in. Now, I don't know if there's been studies about this, but I actually believe that the ability and opportunity to be bored is one of the primary things that set humans on their evolutionary path to what we are today, right? I don't know. I can't get inside my dog's mind who is softly snoring here next to me. I don't know when she's just sitting around staring at the world. I don't know if she's bored or not.

I don't know what's going on in there. But I know the human mind, and it is bored, or was, often bored. And I know that when the human mind is bored, it is spinning, right? It has the opportunity to become insanely creative.

So why do you think humans evolved to be so inventive, so imaginative, so weirdly capable of building entire fantasy universes in our heads? It's not despite boredom, it's because of it. Boredom was our superpower, and it still is. It's still there for us.

The Benefits of Boredom

So have you ever wondered why some of your best ideas happen in the shower? It's practically a cliche at this point, but it's true, right? There's a reason for it.

So unless you're blasting music or catching up on a podcast while you shampoo, the shower is one of the only places left in modern life where we're not consuming content. And it's not some magical quality of the water on your body, right? It's one of the only moments in your entire day when you're kind of forced to be bored, right? You're physically doing something repetitive, so you don't have to think about that. Your body's kind of on autopilot, but your mind is free for just a few minutes. Your brain gets to wander.

It's that short burst of boredom, and it's gold for your creative brain, even in that just few minutes spent in the shower. But the good news is we can tap into that on purpose. We don't have to wait for a shower epiphany, right? That kind of mindset, that kind of thinking is always available to us. We can build those same conditions into our writing life. It just takes intention and a little tolerance for stillness, a little tolerance for allowing yourself to be bored.

So we talked before on this podcast about how writing a novel is both an art and a craft, right? You can learn the structure. You can practice sentence formation.

But the soul of your story, that can only come through stillness. And stillness is not glamorous, right? It's not efficient, but it's vital.

So let your mind be quiet, right? Go for a walk without earbuds. Take a drive in silence with nothing on the stereo. Sit on your porch and do absolutely nothing. Just sit there. At first, it's going to feel really uncomfortable, like withdrawal, really.

But eventually, the noise dies down, and underneath it, that's where story lives. That's where creativity lives. That's where your best ideas come from.

So let's jump into our wise words and see what some other writers have had to say on this topic. So this is Anne Lamott, writer of Bird by Bird, something we mentioned several times on the podcast, an incredible book on creativity. And she says, Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you. I love that, right? That's exactly what we're talking about. If we're not working, right?

We're not feeling creative. Maybe we need to just unplug it for a few minutes. Let's be bored for a while and see where our brain takes us as we reset.

Another one here from John Cleese, not known for being a writer. It is a Monty Python fame, although he has written a memoir and some other things. But nobody can deny he's not an incredibly creative person. And he says, To get into a creative state, you have to create a space for it. That means setting aside time and letting go of the need to be efficient. There is nothing efficient about being bored, right?

There's, it's literally kind of the definition of wasting time is sitting there doing nothing, right? But that's what we need for this creativity. So here's this week's challenge. And I bet you can guess where I'm going here. Build boredom into your writing routine. It doesn't have to be long.

Incorporating Boredom into Writing

You know, maybe 10 minutes a day of silence. No phone, no notebook, no podcast in the background, right? Now, don't confuse this with meditation, which could also be an incredibly powerful writing tool. In fact, we've done a whole podcast episode on that as well.

But meditation is all about quieting your mind and noticing thoughts, but letting them go. This is about letting your mind wander. Let it skip around from thought to thought. Let it dig around in the dark places to see what's lurking there. And like anything else, you might need some practice with this. Don't expect the plot of the next great novel to just drop into your mind by sitting still for five minutes, right?

But you need to trust in this new superpower, right? This boredom. We need to relax into it and just see what it delivers to us over time. Just be. Let your mind drift. You can think about your characters or not, right?

Just let ideas sneak up on you when they're ready. Now, this is the opposite of hustle culture, right? It's not about squeezing more output from your day. It's about creating the inner space for your best ideas, your most original ideas to surface because stories aren't made from content. They're made from contemplation. If you're feeling unsure whether your work in progress is even headed in the right direction, if all the noise has made it hard for you to trust your gut, I've created something to help that I'm really proud of.

It's called the Story Rescue Checklist. It's a quick, powerful tool to help you step back, clear the clutter and get a fresh look at your story's direction. It's completely free and it's one more way to create that space where clarity can finally break through. You can grab that over at the show's website/src for Story Rescue Checklist. Again, the show's website/src or you can check the link in the episode description.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

So you don't need more inspiration, right? We've all watched enough movies and TV shows and TikTok videos and we've read enough books to give us all the story material we'll ever need. What we need is more silence, more stillness, more beautiful, essential boredom. You might find that it actually becomes the most important part of your writing process and the most overlooked.

So thanks for spending some quiet time with me today. If you want more hands-on help with your creative process or maybe you just want to grab that Story Rescue Checklist, head over to the show's website and I'd love to hear from you at bradreed at the show's website. You can email me there.