Writing About Boredom

Fundamentally, I am bored.

Now, this is not much in the way of a revelation, at least to me, but once again I was struck by the fact that this may be the base motivation for much of what I do.

I play Mass Effect 2 for the third and a half time because I’m bored.

I watch videos because I’m bored.

I don’t want to mow the yard, or wash dishes, or clean my room, or do any of a hundred other necessary things because they are boring and I am already fundamentally bored.

I don’t write because I’m bored.

This is the one that is bothering me at the moment. I enjoy writing and I think that I have a certain amount of skill at it, but lately I have found it hard to get myself to sit down and just write. Then, to top it all off, the last time I tried to force myself to sit and write was a disaster. I may have squeezed out a few paragraphs I but they were pretty awful.

It could be a problem with the story I was working on, but I think it might have to do with how I write fiction. I find that I have to see the scene in my head before I can write it. One story I wrote for an online game forum seemed to take forever, because some of the scenes wouldn’t quite come to me.

But, I think the real problem is that I am so fundamentally bored that I find it hard to let my mind wander in the way that helps me imagine the stories.

I am so fundamentally bored that I work at distracting myself and I end up distracting myself from writing as well as almost anything else useful.

Unless of course you consider it useful to catch up on the unwatched videos that you have been meaning to watch.