BORED? YOU NEED TO TAKE A PAUSE

There are many beautiful and strange and terrible and plain weird things to experience in writers work. Some of them make the job a little bit brighter, some of it make it inherently dull and whole lot mundane than it really is. The fact is - most of such things are elaborately open for continuous interpretation and pointless ramblings. You can infinitely produce tips on the same topic over and over again without ever repeating yourself. Sometimes it can go as far as straight antagonism with an amusing amount of oxymoron resolutions on a previous take. 

But among those things one is always the same. It is known as boredom. When it gets boring - you know you're in trouble. While writing process is the routine and there is no other way around it if you want to succeed - boredom is not part of its design. It is something like herpes. It manifests itself once in a while, sometimes with a tedious results. And also - tremendous consequences.

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Boredom is one of the most dangerous things that writer can get into. It is not exactly the writers block level of dangerous and definitely not the worst thing (delusions are) - but it is so toxic you have to take measures or get lost for good.

You can move back, try it again - but the thrill is gone and everything seems to be a little bit "off". There is no point in trying to find the cause of getting bored with your writing. You will only waste your time by attempting to calculate the exact moment when things went wrong. It happened. Admit it. Move on.

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In my own practice - boredom is some kind of impending doom. I'm doing a lot of writing. I also get bored a lot. And I don't like it.  I'm hired gun, a mercenary, i'm writing articles for money and that's my primary motivation for doing it. Usually I don't choose what i am going to write about. And sometimes I have little to none interest in the subject. In other times i'm interested in the subject I get myself oversaturated with it and ultimate get myself unable to write a text the subject deserves. I get weary, miss the errors, leaps of logic, argument slips and other flaws of the text i really should not pass without fixing.

Here's what i do when it happens: I'm taking a pause.

While some may argue that pause is a form of procrastination - I will tell them they're absolutely right - it is. But there is one thing that makes the pause very different. Pause makes you more effective.

The main reason you get bored with your writing is because it goes not like you have expected it to go. This little ultimately funny feeling irritates and makes you loose and then lose focus. And when it is gone - you don't care and when it happens - you need to push the "pause" button.

There's a story in Zen that perfectly illustrates the situations. It revolves around the student who had come to the master for the answers and the master had offered him a cup of tea. But the student was restless and he was constantly asking something. And the master was pouring the tea in his cup all the time - it was spilling over the cup. When the student asked him why he was doing it, the master said "You are like a tea cup - so full that nothing more can be added...".

When you feel that - you need to put the text on pause.

You can do whatever you want while on pause. But not the thing you need to do. You need to cool it down - make it fresh and exciting for you again. Usually, I just surf a bit over Internet in order to let the steam off. I'm going through Wikipedia Loophole, pass through the Futility Closet, wander on Public Domain Review, gaze on Atlas Obscura or Mental Floss. Sometimes i'm writing something else instead. Sometimes I just stand up and go for a walk somewhere or make something to eat. 

Most important thing you need to do while on pause - you must get as much distracted from the subject as you can. You can stare at the wall. You can sit, do nothing and smile. You can even binge-watch "Henri, Un Chat Noire" or "HowToBasic" and think about the "aspect ratio politics of the hair in the clouds". Just avoid don't do what you need to do.

***

32 minutes had passed after I have finished the previous paragraph. Not that I was really bored with writing about being bored with writing. I just wanted to take a pause for a moment and then my cat had performed a despicable act of cleaning himself with the floor. To be honest - these four sentences are here for padding pusposes only.

What is the moment when you can go on with your writing again? Here's how the Zen story i've told you before ends: The master said "Come again when the cup is empty. Come back with an empty mind". When you feel yourself completely detached from a subject, when you don't have any sentiments regarding your text - you can jump on it again and finish with the finesse it deserves.