Curated and distributed in Writing | Psychology
How to Write 10x Engaging Stuff Within 24 Hours With a Simple Habit Change
Your writing spirit will come alive to write winning stories
When we don’t have sex for a long time, anything remotely sexy feels exciting. When we are hungry, every food looks tasty.
When you are multitasking, you are dividing your attention between two or more interests, but you cannot choose one. Fascinating videos and stories confuse you about what makes you feel super excited. You can jump to more exciting stuff in an instant, thanks to the AI-powered auto-suggestions tailored to keep you glued to social media.
If you are not a writer on a mission, it is okay to indulge your visual appetite with entertaining videos. But if you have to create engaging content yourself, you have to quit your pastime and get bored. You have to feel this boredom until you start enjoying your own stream of consciousness and flights of imagination.
When somebody else is making sense of life for you — in a video or an article — your systems start following what the person in the video is saying, and you start shutting down some of your mental processes. Most writers and speakers, including me, are committing this intellectual sin. We are preaching over-generalizing objective truth as the only form of knowledge.
Even when someone is logically consistent — and inspiring — your unique life experience demands you to think in your personal way — your thinking style is as uncommon as your fingerprints, and it is relevant only for you. Nobody can understand your life problems the way you can. The points of view of others may be valid for them, but nobody can imagine what you need right now. Your needs are based solely on your peculiar set of circumstances.
Our minds need time to process information we perceive through our senses. We have to hold our issues in our conscious minds. When a problem is continuously bouncing in our consciousness without a solution, it seeps down into our subconscious — for faster processing — and then the eureka moment solves our problem. But if you start watching a video, your conscious mind incorrectly assumes that it has a solution, and the issue never travels deep into your subconscious mind.
When you are bored, in the absence of external stimuli, your internal engines start working. You want to do something exciting, and if you happen to be a writer, you may come up with an interesting idea to write.
Let yourself be bored at times. If the ideas that you get are not interesting, leave them for some time. Your writing does not need to be entertaining when you have been writing for a couple of hours. Feel free to write the boring stuff. You can always edit the draft to make it more interesting, or later you can remove it altogether.
No writer publishes the draft without editing it first. Editing can be dull if you do not want to remove any part of your writing. After all, you did not allow yourself to write anything irrelevant or monotonous. Had you let yourself write the boring sections, you could remove them to make your editing more fun.
When you are bored, you can feel that your reader wants to read not-boring stories. You could present the dullest parts of life in an entertaining style if you wanted to. Imagine a writing game where you have to compose an enjoyable story with boring parts. For example, when a character in your story feels dull, let her visualize that she is on a beach, wearing a bikini, with her fantasy partner having the most fun time of her life.
Your mind has a psychological immune system, similar to your immune system. If you are feeling bored, your mind will exaggerate the intensity and duration of the feeling of boredom. Your mind, to protect you from boredom, will come up with such magnificent ideas that your creativity may surprise you.
As a writer, you may believe that your boredom will start showing in your writing. On the contrary, when you are bored, you may feel sympathetic towards your readers who might be feeling bored sitting alone in a flat, or a train, or waiting for a doctor’s appointment for a checkup of genital warts. As a bored writer — you are feeling the effects of your dopamine fasting — your words will start becoming enchanted like a magician’s magical wand. The more bored you are, the more compelled you feel to create a word picture so striking that your readers may feel energized.
Torturing yourself with boredom, for your readers, may feel uncomfortable to you. But if your readers feel engaged in your story, it’ll be more than enough compensation for this agony.
When boredom enters your consciousness, your time perception slows. You must have noticed it with boring movies, or when you are attending the wedding of someone other than you, or when you are getting bored waiting for someone to arrive. This slowed-down-perception of time gives you more time to write.
If you have not been listening to gossip, checking messages, or watching youtube for 24 hours, you may even begin to realize what you are supposed to do, i.e., write engaging stories using your imagination.
You must have heard that opposite poles of a magnet attract each other. Extroverted playgirls are rarely fluent with words and imaginative ideas — except in my case — but reserved introverted and sober kinds of guys and girls often shoot down the right words for a hilarious erotic adventure. The farther away you are from extremely exciting stuff in life, the more appealing it seems. Imagining that all goes wonderfully well on a yacht party is only for those who have not been there.
These days it is easy to make your life fun by viewing others having fun, or pretending to be having fun. But if you stop watching that stuff, life can quickly become dull. Overcoming internet addiction might be difficult. But give yourself an hour, and you will start connecting with your self — bored out of your mind. Intentionally practice these sessions, and you should have only a pen and paper to write the story you wish to complete. Once trapped this way, your imagination should start weaving captivating plots that you would be writing for hours, and it would be a satisfactory experience at the end of the day.
In old times, human beings believed every word a writer wrote. The more unusual it was, the more people bought it. The writers created numerous gods and goddesses around the world. Today’s writers can’t — or don’t choose to — create gods or their daily routines. But in older days, the scandals of gods and goddesses used to attract large readership or viewership at the local theatres. Since writers of ancient times lived very dull lives, they dared to write fiction as if it was nonfiction, and people would die protecting and advocating the truth of the godly fairy tales.
If you are bored to death reading this piece, don’t worry. It was time well spent. Reading this should encourage you to write better than this when you pick up your pen. Choose ‘controlled boredom’ in your life and trick your mind into writing amazing stories — so, you could feel satisfied and have a good night’s sleep for a job well done.
