The Importance of Being Bored
Another pseudo-post, this time cribbing a fabulous excerpt of an interview with Kelly Link. I hope to someday be bored again…
Boredom is useful for writers. I need a certain amount of boredom to get work done. But I also need to do other things besides sit at a desk and write. If I weren’t involved in various editing projects, I would have to find something else to do. You need other kinds of work, and you also need significant periods of stillness in order to have time to think. Boredom allows time for thinking. Even in writing, boredom serves a useful function — if I’m boring myself when I write, it means I need to stretch myself, try something I haven’t done before. I can only keep at one kind of work for so long and then I need a change. For the past couple of years it’s been kind of nice to have months in which I am writing, then to move from that to editing the books, thinking about design, print runs, fonts, et cetera. — Kelly Link in Locus Magazine