The importance of wasting time

The other day, while searching for ideas to jumpstart my writer’s brain, I decided to haul out from my file cabinet the library of journals fat with notes from lectures I attended as a Vermont College of Fine Arts graduate student. I thumbed through each page, scanning for a word, a phrase, anything that made my heart skip a beat. Aha, after several minutes, it finally happened, the one sentence I needed most to see, to hear, to touch, to taste: “The importance of wasting time.”I let out a long, calming breath, comforted by this affirmation: it’s okay to be idle.

Creative people do take time off from their projects to engage in completely different activities. Maybe a writer takes time to paint or doodle, to play music, to learn a new skill, or to take a nap – imagine that, taking a nap during the day. Such idleness allows time for “incubation,” says Connie May Fowler and Patrick Madden, prolific writers, authors, and VCFA faculty members. This incubation period works best when we first identity the problem with our manuscript, then step away from it, throw all the worrying over it in the trash – and live our lives. (Take that nap.)

Think of the incubation period as a time for “cooking your book,” Connie and Patrick say. Of course, to leave your book, or project, “cooking,” requires trust – trusting that you’ll eventually be served a heaping plate of creativity while you watch for the water to come to a boil, or the edges of your project to turn a sugary golden brown. But if you’re open to the process, if you are curious and interested in every cobwebbed moment, awake and responsive to every random swirl of a leaf, every sigh of a passing stranger, every intentional touch of a hand on the curve of your back, the creativity will come.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. ~ Virginia Woolf