Boredom

I have never written a book that I didn’t get bored with somewhere in the middle. I think this happens to many writers. The excitement of a new project has worn off, the end is a long way away, and you have read, re-read, thought, and re-thought so much about it that if you weren’t bored there would be something wrong with you.

In the past, when this happened as I was writing my own “stuff”, I would often take a break. (To be honest, sometimes I still do.) I’d put whatever I was bored with away, and start something else – something shiny, exciting, and new. The downside to this is that I might never come back to it, or come back years later, when the momentum had to be built up all over again – and guess what, another spate of boredom would ensue in the middle, so I had really gained nothing. Yet another downside is that I always had a niggling in the back of my mind that a story wasn’t being told, that should be.

In fact, I can’t think of many upsides to taking a break, except the short term one of regaining needed energy – and this is only an upside if you use that energy to jump back into the project soon.

I discovered another way of handling this awful boredom when I began ghostwriting, when breaks were not an option. I couldn’t tell my client that I was bored with his or her book and was “taking a break” – not if I wanted to keep my clients, that is. So instead I slogged through the boring middle piece, sure in my soul that I was writing the dullest prose known to human kind. But an amazing thing happened: the enthusiasm came back, the prose wasn’t so dull after all, and the final third of the book slid off my fingers as if it were greased.

Slogging through boredom takes courage, faith, and trust. I’ll probably never love this segment of book-writing, but I now know that it is just part of the process, sort of a test to see how dedicated I really am. Why should the universe take me seriously if a little boredom can make me quit?

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Kim Pearson is an author, ghostwriter, and owner of Primary Sources, a writing service that helps others become authors of professional and compelling books and articles. She has authored 6 books of her own, and ghostwritten more than 30 non-fiction books and memoirs. To learn more about her books or services, visit http://www.primary-sources.com/.