Or how a long car trip across a lake made me a writer

In our modern life, we spend a lot of time trying not to be bored. Streaming means we’re never more than a few clicks away from a new show or our favorite movie. We carry super-computers in our pockets that can takes us to a world of infinite content with a few clicks. Hell, even I will switch the radio as fast as I can if a commercial comes on.

For our first lesson in how to have more ideas, I want you to do something hard. If you can do this, you will never run out of ideas. You’ll never want for more inspiration, and you’ll always be able to turn that inspiration into actual writing.

I want you to let yourself be bored.

What is the value of boredom?

Yeah, I know. I’m asking for a lot, and it’s only the third damn blog! Stay with me, please. This might be one of the most important things I have learned in my time as a professional writer. You have to let yourself get bored from time to time.

Many writers have spilled a lot of ink on how distracted we’ve become as a society, and I’m not going to waste time repeating it here. Instead, I want to focus in on how boredom is essential for all writers.

Remember my last blog? It was an overwrought piece on where ideas come from that was far too heady for its own good. In it, I said that ideas are the writer taking in the complex world around them (input), letting it muddle around in their head (process), and turning it into a creative story that makes sense of what they saw (output).

There are plenty of ways we can tune up this creative machine, but one of the most important ways is to use it. Ever left a car unused for a long period of time? If you don’t turn it on occasionally, eventually the battery will drain down, and it won’t start at all.

So if you want to keep the ideas flowing, you have to keep bringing in input, processing it, and turning it into output. Boredom comes in at the first part of the process.

Boredom allows you to be present in the moment

“But, Patrick,” you say. “I do pay attention to the world around me! If I weren’t, why, I would be hit by cars, killed by werewolves, or become the victim of the vast government conspiracy trying to control my life!”

First off, hypothetical reader I made up, how do I know you aren’t a ghost? I could have imagined a car hitting you the other day and totally forgotten about it. You wouldn’t be the first imaginary ghost to haunt me.

Secondly, I question how much you actually do pay attention. I question this because attention is a funny thing. Let’s play a game. Watch the video below and tell me how many times the people 

Cool. How many of you noticed the damn gorilla walking through the frame? Studies show that it was probably about half of you. It’s astonishing to realize just how good our brains are at filtering out the things we aren’t really paying attention to.  

Our brains are funny, and the truth of the matter is that we are terrible multitaskers. I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of seven, so I’ve known this my entire life, but I hadn’t truly internalized it until recently. 

You didn’t die when crossing the street, but you might not have been paying that much attention to what was going around you, either. You might have been listening to a podcast or scrolling TikTok. 

And who could blame you? Waiting for the light to change is boring. We don’t like bored – our super smart brains want something to do, and in this day and age, it’s so easy to give it to them.

But resist. That’s your brain trying to take the easy way out. There’s so much out there to see, to hear. Eavesdrop on conversations. Actually see the balconies of your neighbors. Notice when they come and go, especially if it’s unusual. 

You don’t need to travel or visit museums for material (although you should!) There is a whole world around you that you don’t know about because you might not be focusing on it. 

Put the phone away. I’ll have a rant about it in a future blog, don’t worry. Take a walk or sit in a field. When you feel yourself growing bored, let yourself be bored. Then look around, I’m confident you’ll find something interesting.

Boredom gives you space to ask “What if?”

Most of us, I suspect, became writers because we were bored. Stuck in remote locations or difficult family situations, we made our own fun. All children do this, but some of us have turned into a profession.

I grew up split between the North and South shores of Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. New Orleans was on the South Shore. My childhood home of Covington and later my father’s Louisiana home of Madisonville was on the North Shore.

For those of you who don’t know, these two shores are connected by a number of bridges. The most crossed is the Causeway Bridge, which at 26 miles is the longest bridge in the world.

As an adult, I find the illusion of an endless expanse of water beautiful. Especially during sunrise and sunset, it’s a view you won’t find anywhere else.

As a child, I was bored out of my big-for-my-age skull. If I had finished my book and my Game Boy was out of batteries, I was stuck with my dad’s oddball choice of music. (Aside: how many times can one man listen to the same Stevie Ray Vaughn album?)

So I had nothing to do but stare out the window at the endless lake, and daydream. I would imagine little stories taking place out on the lake or an endless sea. At first, I put in characters from my favorite cartoons, but eventually, I started making things up whole cloth. 

It’s dangerous to be nostalgic for times gone by, and Lord knows that you couldn’t pay me enough money to be a teenager again. But I sometimes miss my parents driving me across the lake as I stared off in the distance and daydreamed to fight boredom. What Jeff VanDermeer calls “Creative Play” in his seminal treatise on imaginative fiction: “Wonderbook”. 

It’s easy to be bored as a child. Your attention span is naturally short, and you’re often not in that much control of your environment. As an adult, you’re free to do more of what you want. If I’m bored writing an article for this blog, I can go play Yakuza 2, watch Evil, or open up Reddit.

We love some of that daydreamy creative play as adults because we don’t have to be as bored, something our modern distracted world goes out of its way to help. 

That same freedom, however, can help us regain it. We just need to be intentional about it.

Conclusion

Hopefully, I’ve sold you on the importance of boredom. There’s a third benefit to boredom I haven’t touched on – it helps you to focus. But focus is a topic in and of itself. Don’t worry, hypothetical reader ghost. We will get there.

Next week, I’m going to share five ways you can intentionally help yourself be bored so you can be more present and even daydream a little. 

In the meantime, I’ve got a little homework for you. If you’re reading this blog, and you think I might be on to something, I want you to share a formative moment of boredom with me. 

Down in the comments, tell a story about a time you were bored and what daydreams and flights of fancy that boredom took you on. I did it for this blog and found it incredibly rewarding. Maybe you will too.