Boredom and Creativity: A Writing Superpower

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Inside Creative Writing

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your writing has nothing to do with your keyboard. In this thought-provoking episode, Brad explores how boredom can actually be your secret weapon when writing a novel. By leaning into stillness, cutting distractions, and giving your mind space to wander, you unlock deeper insights, clearer ideas, and stronger connections to your story.

In a world constantly filled with noise, this episode makes the case for building boredom into your writing life, not avoiding it. Through personal stories, classroom experiences, and scientific insights, you’ll learn how to reframe boredom not as a productivity killer, but as a vital part of the creative process.

Key takeaways include:

• Why boredom is crucial for creative breakthroughs
• How constant content consumption drowns out your unique voice
• Simple ways to build quiet, intentional boredom into your daily life
• What the “default mode network” is and why it matters to storytellers
• How your childhood creativity was fueled by boredom, and still can be

Whether you’re stuck in your novel’s early stages or trying to rediscover your writing spark, this episode will help you reconnect with your own imagination.

If you want even more clarity on where your novel is headed, be sure to grab the free Story Rescue Checklist or explore the How to Write a Novel page for more essential tools.

Formatted and Edited Transcript

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. Let’s get started.

OK. Before we jump in, I want to 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 want to start with an experience I had going back to college to become a teacher. This was probably about 2014. I took a class on the psychology of adolescence. One of the textbooks we used was old, like pre-Internet old. One of the chapters was all about how important boredom was for the formation of the adolescent mind and how essential it was for the exploration and discovery of one’s unique identity.

Back then, teens spent countless hours 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 music or podcasts in their ears. When they couldn’t sleep, they would just lie awake, bored and thinking. Car rides were quiet, except for maybe the radio, for long hours in the back seat.

The thesis of that part of the textbook was that this forced boredom was vital for young people 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 essential for identity formation.

What Does This Have to Do with Writing

Now, if this were a psychology podcast, we could dive into what’s been lost and how much of our cultural identity crisis comes from this lack of boredom and introspection that we’re now shielded from. As a society, we have constant boredom-killing technology. But this isn’t a psychology podcast, so what does this have to do with writing?

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 know what matters to you. What images haunt you? What questions keep tugging at the edges of your brain?

You can’t find those answers while doom-scrolling. Trust me, I’m as guilty of that as anyone. Those answers come in the quiet, introspective, and yes, even boring moments that we all try to avoid.

Story from a Bored Childhood

Here’s story number two. It was the middle of summer. I was maybe seven or eight years old. There were five stations on the television. Other than Saturday mornings, almost none of them showed anything for kids. There was no cable TV. There weren’t even VCRs. The Internet wasn’t even imagined yet.

So my brothers and I would be bored stiff. Sure, we had the occasional soccer practice or maybe a trip to the movies, but other than that, there was nothing structured to do. We didn’t have screens. We had long stretches of hot afternoons.

So we invented things. Not on purpose; we just didn’t have any other options, other than complaining to our parents about how bored we were, which we did a lot.

I remember one day we reimagined our basement into a medieval kingdom. We built a throne room. We got out all the pillows and blankets and stacked books up. One of us, usually my older brother, reigned over the rest of us as king.

We did this every day for what seemed like weeks. Maybe it was just a few days, but in my memory, it lasted forever. The rest of us were knights sent on impossible missions into other rooms, upstairs, or even out into the wild lands of our backyard. There were dragons. There were betrayals. There were secret scrolls and ancient swords.

It was thrilling. It was life-and-death adventure. And in our minds, it had all the depth and suspense of a Tolkien novel. Amazing times. Amazing memories.

The Nerdiest Election Ever

Another time, and this is going to sound really nerdy because it was, we gathered every stuffed animal we could find in the house. Every figurine. Anything that could be imagined to be alive and have a personality. We brought them all into the basement and held a massive election for President of the House.

We each picked our candidates and gave speeches for them in front of the gathered masses. We held a vote where everyone in attendance was represented. We would go through and become each stuffed animal or figurine and explain how they were going to vote.

Thinking back, my older brother, who was always the king, also managed to get his candidates to always win as well. The system may have been rigged.

This whole process took hours. We were completely engaged. We invented issues, imagined personalities, and created opportunities for how to improve our little world.

Yes, it was nerdy. But was it creative? Absolutely. And it was driven entirely by boredom.

It All Grew from Nothing

I could tell a hundred other stories about the 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 your own childhood. Or maybe you’re younger than me, but 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 are no phones. No Internet. You’re just there with your meandering thoughts.

Maybe laying under the coffee table suddenly became a spaceship. Or maybe you invented entire worlds from the patterns in the carpet. If you’ve got stories like that, I’d love it if you’d share some of your bored-kid inventions below in the comments. I’d really love to hear from you, especially those moments where boredom turned into creativity.

So that was boredom. And it was glorious.

The Gift We Didn’t Recognize

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.”

But eventually our imaginations would kick in. And once they did, they swept us away. We didn’t know it at the time, but those moments of boredom were required to reveal the creativity and imagination bubbling just under the surface.

Our brains, unoccupied by scrolling or swiping, turned inward. They wandered. They wondered. They created stories.

Why This Is a Problem Now

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. Even standing in line at the grocery store comes with a side of TikTok.

Think about your reaction when you’re in a waiting room or a commercial comes on the television. I know mine: I reach for my phone. And everyone else does too. Just look around. In those moments, nearly everyone is on their phone trying to fill even the smallest moment of boredom.

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. You don’t have room to think your own thoughts that aren’t colored by the nonstop fire hose of information.

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. This is basically the part of your brain that lights up when you’re daydreaming, reflecting, connecting ideas. In other words, it’s where storytelling begins.

Learn more about the default mode network.

Stillness Leads to Stories

One more story from my college years, and then I promise I’ll be done with those. We were in a unit on how to teach students to become better readers. Just out of curiosity, I asked my classmates (all future English teachers) how they first fell in love with reading.

We were all voracious readers, so I was curious. How did we get that way? What made us fall in love with books?

As people shared their stories, something really interesting came to light. Every single one of them had the same origin story. They were bored.

One talked about house-sitting for her grandma who lived out in the country. No Internet. No cable TV. Just a few channels with rabbit ears on top of the television. She was stuck there for a few days with nothing to do. Then she saw some books on a shelf. Picked one up. Started reading. And it came alive to her. From that moment, she was a reader.

Another shared that their English teacher set aside ten or twenty minutes every day for personal choice reading during class. No phones. No music. Just you and your book. At first, it felt like torture. A prison sentence. But eventually, with nothing else to do, they opened the book and got pulled in. It changed everything.

Someone else talked about getting grounded and losing phone privileges. There were books lying around, so they picked one up. That was it. The spark.

Every story was the same. Boredom led them to books. Stillness led them to stories.

The Same Is True for Writers

This isn’t 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 our brains are finally quiet enough to pay attention to the stories swirling around inside us.

But here’s the wild thing. We’ve become almost afraid of being bored. Like it’s some kind of unnatural state that needs to be fixed immediately with a scroll or a swipe or some kind of distraction. We’re starting to treat boredom like torture. Something to avoid at all costs.

But here’s the thing. The history of human beings is boredom. Massive, all-encompassing, perpetual boredom, interrupted only occasionally by action or entertainment.

Boredom Made Us Human

Think back to earlier eras in human history. Hours and hours of reaping and sowing in the fields. No entertainment. No music in your ears. Just the rhythm of your work and the spinning of your mind. It was inventing. Creating. Thinking deeply.

Or think about days spent walking behind herds or tracking prey. Hours of monotony with nothing to fill it. That is what it meant to be human for most of our existence.

Seasons spent simply watching the fire. Long stretches of silence with nothing but your thoughts and the sound of the wind in the grass.

And from that silence, myth was born. Music was born. Language. Tools. Storytelling. Creativity itself. All of it came from that deeply human space of boredom.

I don’t know if there are studies on this, but I genuinely believe that the ability and opportunity to be bored is one of the primary things that set humans on our evolutionary path. I can’t get inside my dog’s mind, she’s snoring softly next to me. I don’t know if she gets bored when she’s just lying there. But I do know the human mind. And it gets bored. And when it does, it starts spinning. Imagining. Creating.

So why do you think humans became so inventive? So imaginative? So capable of building entire fantasy universes in our heads? It’s not in spite of boredom. It’s because of it.

The Shower Epiphany

Have you ever wondered why some of your best ideas happen in the shower? It’s practically a cliché at this point, but there’s a reason for it.

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 something magical about the water hitting your body. It’s one of the only moments in your day when you are forced to be bored. Your body is doing something repetitive. Your mind is free. That short burst of boredom is gold for your creative brain.

Making Space for Creative Thought

We can create those same conditions in our writing life. It just takes intention and a little tolerance for stillness. A little tolerance for allowing ourselves to be bored.

We’ve talked before on this podcast about how writing a novel is both an art and a craft. You can learn structure. You can practice sentence formation. But the soul of your story, that can only come through stillness.

Stillness is not glamorous. It’s not efficient. But it is vital.

Let your mind be quiet. Go for a walk without earbuds. Take a drive in silence. Sit on your porch and do absolutely nothing. At first, it’s going to feel uncomfortable. Like withdrawal. 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.

Wise Words from Other Creatives

Let’s jump into our wise words segment and see what other writers have to say on this topic.

Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird, an incredible book on creativity that we’ve mentioned several times, says this:

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”

We love that. That’s exactly what we’re talking about. If we’re not working, if we’re not feeling creative, maybe we just need to unplug. Be bored for a little while. Let the mind reset.

Another one, from John Cleese. You might know him best from Monty Python, but he’s also a writer and a famously creative thinker. 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. Sitting and doing nothing is practically the definition of inefficiency. But that’s where creativity lives.

This Week’s Challenge

Here’s this week’s challenge, and I bet you already know what it’s going to be. Build boredom into your writing routine.

It doesn’t have to be long. Maybe just ten minutes a day of silence. No phone. No notebook. No podcast in the background.

Now don’t confuse this with meditation, which can also be a powerful writing tool. We’ve done an episode on that. But meditation is about quieting your mind and letting thoughts pass without holding onto them.

This is different. This is about letting your mind wander. Let it skip from thought to thought. Let it dig around in the dark places and see what’s lurking there.

Like anything else, you might need to practice this. Don’t expect the plot of your next novel to drop into your brain the first time you sit still. But trust this superpower: boredom. Relax into it and see what it delivers. Just be. Let your mind drift. Think about your characters, or don’t. Let ideas sneak up on you when they’re ready.

The Opposite of Hustle

This is the opposite of hustle culture. It’s not about squeezing more output from your day. It’s about creating inner space so your best, most original ideas can surface.

Because stories aren’t made from content. They’re made from contemplation.

If you’re feeling unsure about where your work in progress is going, or if all the noise has made it hard to trust your gut, I’ve created something that might help. It’s called the Story Rescue Checklist. It’s a quick and 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.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need more inspiration. We’ve all consumed enough stories to last a lifetime. What we need is more silence. More stillness. More beautiful, essential boredom.

You might find that it becomes the most important and most overlooked part of your writing process.

Thanks for spending some quiet time with me today. And if you’d like to reach out, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at brad.reed@insidecreativewriting.com with any comments or topic suggestions for future episodes.

Until next time, remember that the best way to improve as a writer is by writing.

And I encourage you, in addition to writing, let yourself get wonderfully, gloriously bored.

For more novel-writing insight, check out our comprehensive How to Write a Novel guide.

See you soon.

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