The Power of being bored out of your skull

Shorter blog post today because my fingers hurt from all this writing I’ve been doing lately! (My fingers are fine, I’m just having a whinge.)

Tunnelling through the back end of a novel’s first draft is hard and arduous work. When I write, I enjoy and write most rapidly in the phases of discovery and invention. When the story is fresh and new and often times unplanned. A lot of that goes away in the second half because suddenly I’m busy tying up plot points, getting caught in overlapping webs of character motivations or trying to retcon in particular details to make sure the entire story doesn’t fall flat on its face.

Without this constant excitement, I often find myself in the doldrums in other areas of my life as well. Food doesn’t seem as exciting, going to the gym seems like more of a chore than a past time and getting off my ass to do thing seems hard because there’s a sword of Damocles hanging over my head with “write the damn book!” inscribed on its hilt.

I’m usually drawn towards things that’ll serve as a distraction from all this as a means to wind down. I’ll often have a podcast in my ears, or get (even more) heavily into whatever I’m playing on xbox in an attempt to remove myself from the harder parts of the writing.

However this all means that when I do eventually sit down to pound out another chapter, I don’t have the momentum to start hammering at the keys. It’s like I’m hauling myself out of the molasses of whatever other activity I just extricated myself from and am now being hauled back in by it.

Of course, once I do eventually start, I’m in my element. Suddenly three hours have passed and there’s another three thousand words on the page. It often leaves me feeling like a toddler that had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the beach, only for them to afterwards be dragged kicking and screaming away from it.

It was only when I was taking a shower one night, (like I do every night, don’t worry) that I realised why this was so hard. Of course ADHD does take the top billing here, but I hadn’t clocked the fact that I wasn’t allowing myself to be bored.

Being bored is a fresh, clean slate. It’s a natural state which I now have come to realise isn’t one to be avoided. The best ideas come to people in the shower simply because it’s the one place these days to be free of external stimulation or demands for attention. A mind is finally free to think and wander without the pressure of having its path be written down and charted, or be interrupted by another mind, be one carried by a person or by another device or creation (a book, a screen, a phone, etc).

I can’t take a shower every time I need to think, however. While I’d be very clean, I’d run out of hot water and my thoughts would turn to how damn cold it is in there, which is a different kind of motivation.

This is where some basic form of meditation comes in. I’ve now designated a chair in my little home office as the “sit and think” chair, which I throw myself into before undertaking any activity. It doesn’t face anything in particular, and the only thing in reach is a pen and paper in the case I really need to write something down.

I’ll give myself as long as it takes for my proverbial mind juices to start flowing, and only then will I leap up and attack whatever they direct me to. Sometimes it’s writing, more often times its something else, but I’ve found a far greater pleasure in participating in life like this instead of dragging myself from one task to another that it feels worthwhile. All the things that need to get done are still getting done, it’s just that they’re all happening out of order.

Much like my books! You can find more ADHD ramblings buried in the subtext of both The Flux Catastrophe series and The First Hytharo series, with the next release coming for the former in the form of Blazing Flux, due out April 2nd.

My question to you is to ask how you like to focus? Do you use music? Or need complete silence? What do you do if you can’t get one or the other?

In place of next month’s blog post, I’m finally committed to putting up one of the deleted scenes I’ve long promised! This one will be the battle that occurred inside the walking fortress of Revance when the Locust’s launched their mutiny. It was originally a core part of the story, but I ended up cutting it because it seemed like one too many battles to be in the book.

I’ll talk more about it in my next post, but until then, hope you’re having a good one!