I wonder how many of us are fighting boredom in these days of lockdown? I have to say I have lots to do and am kept busy most times, and boredom isn’t a huge problem. Except sometimes!

The other day I was browsing around BBC World News. It’s one of the two sources I rely on for sensible reporting (the other being Aljazeera), but I’ve also found they have lots of feature stories and videos. One I found last week was about how embracing boredom can lead to all sorts of creativity. Embracing is my word here, but I think it expresses the essence of the article.

Think about it — what do you do when you start to feel bored? Most of us immediately look for something to relieve the boredom! It might be reading (as it usually is for me), watching Netflix, playing a game, watching television, engaging in a hobby, going for a walk — the list is endless. But the point of all of these is to get rid of the feeling of boredom, which we don’t like.

But what if you didn’t do that? What if you acknowledged the boredom and simply sat down and experienced it for a while. Your brain won’t go into a coma. It will continue to work and take you places you might not expect, and that’s where the creativity comes in.

Look what these writers’ boredom gave us

The writer of this piece cited two examples. Apparently Margaret Attwood watches birds. I don’t mean she’s a birder; she simply stares at birds flying around in the sky. Pretty mindless, right? Yes, and that’s the point. It’s boring, but she finds that boredom often leads to her most creative moments.

You may know the story of J. K. Rowling’s fateful train journey from Manchester to London. The train came to a stop in the middle of nowhere, and the delay lasted four hours. Not having a book to read, she sat staring out at the green fields, bored out of her mind. Ah, but her mind didn’t go to sleep. She talks of having a sudden image in her mind of a boy with dark tousled hair and glasses, and by the time the train arrived in London she had mapped out the 30,000 foot concept for the whole Harry Potter series. As the writer points out, if she had had her iPad and Netflix, Harry Potter might never have come into being!

During these Covid-19 days, we’ve all laughed and marveled at the creative, funny, moving or just plain strange videos people have created while stuck at home day after day in a state of crushing boredom. Coincidence? Maybe not.

My experiment

So I decided to test this out and see what happened. I’m not very good at doing nothing as a rule, but this time I decided to just be. Was I bored? Oh yes! I was dying to make a cup of tea or wander around in YouTube land, but I persevered in embracing the boredom. I’m not sure how long it lasted really, or how the ideas formed, but I came out of it with two writing ideas.

The first was inspired by a window in the building opposite mine. It was open, and a brightly coloured curtain was billowing outside. I wondered who lived there and what they were doing. In the end, I imagined a ghostly figure in the window. In fact, it was a ghost, and normally only the people who live in the apartment could see it. What if there was a way for the viewer to communicate with them and let them know he could see it too? That could be the seed of an idea for a short story. What if it was written from the point of view of the ghost? Hmmm.

In my other scenario, for some reason Eddie Greenspan had popped into my mind out of nowhere, and I started thinking of trial lawyers. What if a trial lawyer had a superpower? What if she could tell when someone was lying because a jagged aura appeared over their heads? That could be interesting, but would it really be useful? Well it would be if she could then read their minds! Maybe she doesn’t read minds as a matter of course, but only when someone lies to her — and only for the rest of that particular conversation. So if she can engage the witness on the stand long enough, she can learn what they are thinking, but as soon as the conversation ends she loses the power. I think that has the makings of a great story.

Neither of these is something I’m particularly interested in writing myself, but they sure are creative! And the came to me when I felt bored, embraced the feeling and went with whatever came along.

My new LinkedIn headline is “Why waste a good lockdown? Get your book written now!” My new attitude is, “Why waste good boredom? Embrace it and see what happens!”