The phone rings, and it’s your best friend who needs help with a very large problem. No worries; you can handle it.
Then the dog runs away for half the day and you’re consumed with finding your furry friend and taking calls from neighbors who “may have” seen a dog loping across their yards.
After the dog comes back, fur all green from rolling in the alfalfa field, you get a notice in the mail that your sister is getting married. And you had no idea she even had a boyfriend. Oh, and she wants the wedding to take place at your house.
No worries. You can probably handle that, too.
Life is filled with all the good news, the bad news, and who-knows-what-else. It is a rich, full, exciting life.
And there’s the problem.
Why is a rich, full, exciting life a problem? It usually isn’t, unless you’re a writer.
Now, I know we need these experiences, otherwise we would have nothing to write about. “Write what you know.” After all, where do our ideas come from? Well, they come from our experiences, right? What we’ve done, seen, had done to us, etc.
Then, at a certain point, it all needs to stop, at least for a while.
We need to get bored.
Face it; if our lives are like a daytime soap opera all the time, and our minds are racing around dealing with it all, there is no desire to write fiction. Who needs to dream up a great story when your mind is plenty busy, overly stimulated, or stressed-out?
Even if your goal is to write a memoir, your brain still needs time to process it all, to focus on nothing except for what happened to you. To interpret it, to learn from it, and to turn it all into a work of literature.
The point is: our minds need to get so bored that we start fabricating stories…or develop the true stories of our lives.
This, my friend, is the way I defeated writer’s block. Remember my blog post about how my entire novel came to me while I was vacuuming? Well, housework is, for most of us, quite boring. Boredom is what sows the seeds for “what if?” and takes your imagination in wild directions—anything to squash the boredom.
“Great!” you might say, “A solution to writer’s block! This could work for me!”
Now…just how do I get bored?
So, there’s the next problem. You do not have the freedom to create and maintain a boring life, even for a little while. The bills need to be paid; you need to go to your hyped-up, supercharged corporate job; your family and/or friends are a constant saga.
I say, “Death to the Saga!” Retreat! Remove yourself for some or all of it, in whatever way you can. Perhaps you can delegate some of the load. Drag someone else into the saga of your family or friends, and then conveniently disappear for a little bit.
There is some hope. You may not be able to change certain aspects of your life, but is there anything you can do without? Can you get rid of the corporate job and switch it for something much more mundane? If your writing is important enough to you, and you really don’t want to continue such a stressful career (complete with corporate nonsense), then you have a double reason to quit! It’s okay, really. It is now socially acceptable to ditch the “great career” and do something less prestigious. If you would feel more comfortable having an excuse, just tell people that the stress is really taking a toll on you, mentally and physically. This is probably not a lie.
If you absolutely can’t quit your exciting, stressful job, or you don’t want to, then perhaps you can schedule for yourself a bubble. A bubble of boredom.
Think of a task that lasts a few hours and allows you to go on autopilot. Could you take on a regular volunteer job picking up trash alongside of the road? Unless you find a dead possum or dirty diapers in the ditch, this can get very hum-drum.
Pick something that takes as little brain power as possible. It should be something that allows you to be all by yourself for long stretches of time. It should be something that you can do while thinking about something else. This will free up your mind to create. To invent. To wander and explore.
Make whatever arrangements are necessary to be alone with your thoughts. Get that babysitter, if you must. Board the dog for a few hours so you can get the wild animal out of your hair.
Get as alone and as bored as you possibly can.
And if you are at a loss for anything else, there is always vacuuming.