When do you get your best ideas?
Frosting a cake, working out, jogging, taking a shower, washing dishes, folding clothes, doodling: these are essentially mindless activities. You’re not focused on critical thinking or problem solving. Your mind wanders. This is good for writers.
The reason why is that writers often carry their work with them. The poem or story that they’re currently working on is there in the subconscious. And, suddenly, they need paper and pencil because their mind has made a wonderful leap in that story or poem. They have a new direction to go in, a subplot, another problem for a character to solve.
Writers talk about having to pull the car over to write. Needing to keep paper and pen by their bedside. Hoping they’ll remember that thought until they can get they’re hands on paper and pen.
What doesn’t work:
Facebooking, Twitter/X, surfing the web, watching TV: these activities are not mindless. They engage the brain just enough to keep it from making these amazing leaps in the thought process. They are hinderances. How often do writers say they don’t have time to write, but they’ve spent hours scrolling through social media? Make your writing a priority.
Keep your WIP going
A big part of writing takes place in the brain before we put pen to paper, or our fingers to the keyboard. So, whatever mindless activity you do today, try keeping your work upfront in your mind, and see what happens.
And let me know how it goes.
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Thank you for visiting.
Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist:
Multi-finalist award winning novel In the Context of Love
Picture book Gordy and the Ghost Crab
Latest poetry chapbook: Sleepwalker
Connect with Linda: LinkTree
Precisely! Talked about this in a writing class last night – how the writer’s brain is always somewhat engaged in the writing BUT only if it has some space to be *lazy* away from so much verbal and word-based stimuli. For me, it’s walking, cooking, and organizing stuff around the house.
How interesting – that you were just discussing this! What a great term: word-based stimuli. That’s exactly why it can slow a writer down. Walking is great, cooking doesn’t do it for me. Of course, cooking doesn’t do much of anything for me. Ha! Thanks for your comments, Lisa!
I suppose I get my best ideas when I least expect them to arise. They usually get jotted down somewhere and filed. But mostly, time away from the couch/desk/whatever doesn’t *generate* ideas. The gym, in particular, gets me physically tired out and therefore, somehow, opens the mind. I have better focus and am more likely to be decisive about what’s happening in whatever I’m working on — cut, rewrite, move, or expand.
Tara, I agree with you about exercise. I haven’t used my recumbent bicycle since we got a doggy that demands daily walks, but I used to call it my idea generator. I had to keep a pad of paper near me.