Mind-wandering … daydreaming … sitting around, and doing nothing, thereby annoying family members with agendas of their own. It’s an activity that is looked down upon because it represents idleness in a society that demands productivity. We have a culture that celebrates doing, achieving, producing, and succeeding.
When observed by others, a person who is daydreaming appears lazy. Mind-wandering has no obvious purpose, but it is critical for creativity. Every groundbreaking discovery in science, every great invention we enjoy today—all were inspired by ideas that came to a person while thinking about something else or when they were mind-wandering.
Taking the time to sit and think about nothing in particular has everything to do with the nature and genesis of storytelling.
The ability to explain the world through stories and allegory emerges strongly in some people. Many are naturally able to form and express a story, even when discretion would be better. I can create a string of BS like no one else at the drop of a hat:
My oldest daughter, looking at our dinner, a casserole of beans with cornbread baked on top like a cobbler: “What the heck is that?”
Me, ever the smartass: “It’s stewed Yeti in gravy with a sweet cornbread topping. Try it. I think you’ll like it.”
Daughter: “Why can’t we have normal food, like normal people?” Takes a bite. “Mom. This tastes like the beans we had last night, except you added cornbread. You said the beans were jackalope nuggets.”
Me: “Did I say that? Sorry. I meant Yeti. I get the two confused.”
Daughter: “I’ll just have salad.”
Me: “Great choice. I made the ranch dressing with …”
Daughter: “Oh, God. Here it comes.”
Me: “… lion’s milk, since we’re out of buttermilk.”
Other people need the subliminal prompting of an image to spark their creativity. If you’ve visited here at Life in the Realm of Fantasy on a Friday, you know how much I love looking at and talking about art.
I’m not educated as an art historian, and I hope I don’t come off as pretending to be one. But I love the paintings of great artists because they tell a story. I like to research great art and the artists who created it. I love to share the images I come across and hopefully give others like me access to see the art that humanity is capable of, good and bad.
Perception is in the eye of the beholder. Observation and thought are seeds that inspire extrapolation, leading the viewer to come away with new ideas. When I see the story captured in a single scene by an artist, my mind always surmises more than the painting shows. I see the picture as depicting the middle of the story and imagine what came before and what happened next. Unintentionally, I put a personal spin on my interpretation, and ideas are born. I don’t mean to, but everyone does.
Wikipedia tells us this about that: In mathematics, extrapolation is a type of estimation, beyond the original observation range, of the value of a variable on the basis of its relationship with another variable. It is similar to interpolation, which produces estimates between known observations, but extrapolation is subject to greater uncertainty and a higher risk of producing meaningless results. [1]
In real life, extrapolation is the act of an idea emerging from an idea, creating a chain of ideas that coalesce and form an assumption. That assumption generates more ideas, and the “thought party” roars on. This is how great novels begin.
Anthony Jack, a cognitive scientist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, says, “How we daydream and think depends on the brain’s structure. …(That) structure is constantly changing in small ways—as we learn new things the connections between nerve cells change.” (Read “Beyond the Brain” in National Geographic magazine.) [2]
We have long known that creative people are often guilty of mind-wandering. Researchers have shown that daydreaming makes you more creative. The mental conversation occurs when the daydreaming mind cycles through different parts of the brain and taps into the subconscious mind, bringing up information we had but were unaware of. The daydreaming mind connects bits of information we’ve never considered in that particular way.
According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a wandering mind can impart a distinct cognitive advantage. [3]
This means that daydreaming is actually good for you. It boosts the brain, making our thought process more effective. Letting the mind wander allows a kind of ‘default neural network’ to engage when our brain is at wakeful rest, as in meditation, rather than actively focusing on the outside world. When we daydream, our brains can process tasks more effectively.
This is good to know because, as an author, I spend an astounding amount of time daydreaming, and I would hate to be simply wasting time!
Meditating on a tone, a pattern, or an image is a time-honored means of expanding one’s mind. Meditating or daydreaming turns off parts of your brain. Our brain has an analytic part that makes reasoned decisions and an empathetic part that allows us to relate to others.
Researchers have found when a person daydreams, their mind naturally cycles through different modes of thinking, analytic and empathetic. During this time, your brain’s rational and sympathetic parts tend to turn each other off, which is why this habit is crucial to creativity.
Creative people are often guilty of mind-wandering, but researchers have shown that daydreaming makes you more creative.
You could be watching the birds, as my husband and I often do. Or maybe you’re perusing the display in a local art gallery or listening to music. I love all genres of music, but for writing I often find inspiration in powerhouse classical pieces such as Orff’s cantata, Carmina Burana, or Nobuo Uematsu‘s soundtracks to the Final Fantasy game franchise.
Whatever you choose to meditate on doesn’t matter. The act of mind-wandering generates ideas.
Let your mind wander. That feeling of stress will lessen, and soon, you may have an idea for a novel, a painting, or music.
Credits and Attributions:
Cornbread, Zankopedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Skillet cornbread (cropped).jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Skillet_cornbread_(cropped).jpg&oldid=449104554 (accessed June 24, 2023).
[1] Wikipedia contributors, “Extrapolation,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Extrapolation&oldid=1144519982 (accessed June 24, 2023).
[2] Beyond the Brain by James Shreeve, Cognitive Function Article, Neuroscience Information, Mapping Brain Facts — National Geographic Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic SocietyCopyright © 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved (accessed June 24, 2023)
[3] Where do our minds wander? Brain waves can point the way (medicalxpress.com) by Yasmin Anwar, University of California – Berkeley (accessed June 24, 2023)
Today, however, I plan a long walk along the beach.
I have no trouble selling my friends’ books – I’ve read them all and love them, and love selling them. Maybe I can sell their books because I’m not emotionally invested in their creation, but I am invested as a reader.
Next week on this blog we will talk about the creative process and the importance of mind-wandering. We’ll also talk about why it is important to beta read for your fellow writers, and how to be a good reader, one who gives positive feedback and offers constructive suggestions.
Some novels are character-driven, others are event-driven, but all follow an arc. I’m a poet, and while I read in every genre, I seek out literary fantasy, novels with a character-driven plot. These are works by authors like 
And the prose … words with impact, words combined with other words, set down in such a way that I feel silly even thinking I can write such works. Thankfully, my editor weeds out pretentious hyperbole and slaps me back to reality.
This part of the novel is often difficult for me to get right. The protagonist must be put through a personal crisis. Their inner world must be shaken to the foundations.
This emotional low point is necessary for our characters’ personal arcs. It is the place where they are forced to face their weaknesses and rebuild themselves. They must discover they are stronger than they ever knew.
And what of my female protagonist? Where does her story begin?
I must introduce a story-worthy problem in those pages, a test propelling the protagonist to the middle of the book. The opening paragraphs are vital. They are the hook, the introduction to my voice, and must offer a reason for the reader to continue past the first page.
My favorite books open with a minor conflict, evolving to a series of more significant problems, working up to the first pinch point, where the characters are set on the path to their destiny.
In literary terms, this uneven distribution of knowledge is called asymmetric information. We see this all the time in the corporate world.
Jared is hilarious, charming, naïve, a bit cocky, and completely unaware that he’s an arrogant jackass. He is a young man who is exceptionally good at everything and is happy to tell you about it. Jared has no clue that his boasting holds him back, as no one wants to work with him.
When I started writing this story, I had the core conflict: Jared’s misguided desire to be important. I had the surface quest: rescuing the kidnapped kid. I had the true quest: Jared learning to laugh at himself and developing a little humility.
Calendar time is a layer of world-building. It sets the story in a particular era and shows the passage of time.
Consider the following sentences: “I eat,” “I am eating,” “I have eaten,” and “I have been eating.”
Every story is unique; some work best in the past tense, while others must be set in the present.
If I were writing a story starring me as the main character, I would open it in the year 2005 with a couple of empty-nesters buying a house in a bedroom community twenty miles south of Olympia.
The city center is isolated, twelve miles from the freeway and twenty miles away from every other town in the south county. If a fictional story were set in this town, it would feature the same political and religious schisms that divide the rest of our country. There are other tensions. Some families have been here for generations, and a few don’t appreciate the influx of low-paid state workers buying cookie-cutter tract homes (like mine) here.
Two inches of rain fell the day we moved into our brand-new home in 2005, making moving our furniture into this house a misery. Our new house had no landscaping and rose from a sea of mud and rocks. With a lot of effort, we made a pleasant yard. When the housing bubble burst in 2008, many people on my side of the street lost their jobs, and some homes went into foreclosure.
Our main street, Sussex, passes through a historic district. The buildings are all built from sandstone quarried at the old quarries. Many of the old buildings are home to antique stores. The masonic lodge is made of Tenino sandstone.
In writing, we add depth and contour to our prose by how we choose and use our words. We “paint” a scene using words to show what the point-of-view character is seeing or experiencing. Yes, we do need to use some modifiers and descriptors.
One of the cautions those of us new to the craft frequently hear are criticisms about the number of modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) we habitually use. This can hurt, especially if we don’t understand what the members of our writing group are trying to tell us.
In the above sentence, the essential parts are structured this way: noun – verb (sunlight glared), adjective – noun (cold fire), verb – adjective – noun (cast no warmth), and finally, verb-article-noun (burned the eyes). Lead with the action or noun, follow with a strong modifier, and the sentence conveys what is intended but isn’t weakened by the modifiers.
Mood is long-term, a feeling residing in the background, going almost unnoticed. Mood affects (and is affected by) the emotions evoked within the story.
Undermotivated emotions lack credibility and leave the reader feeling as if the story is flat. In real life, we have deep, personal reasons for our feelings, and so must our characters.
Robert McKee tells us that the mood/dynamic of any story is there to make the emotional experience of our characters specific. It makes their emotions feel natural. After all, the mood and atmosphere 
The commonly bandied proverbs of writing are meant to encourage us to write lean, descriptive prose and craft engaging conversations. These sayings exist because the craft of writing involves learning the rules of grammar, developing a broader vocabulary, developing characters, building worlds, etc., etc.
Then, there are the stories where the author leans too heavily on the internal. Creased foreheads are replaced with stomach-churning, gut-wrenching shock or wide-eyed trembling of hands.
Indeed, we shouldn’t be married to our favorite prose or characters. Sometimes we must cut a paragraph, a chapter, or even a character we love because it no longer fits the story. But have a care – people read for pleasure. Perhaps that phrase does belong there. Maybe that arrangement of words really was the best part of that paragraph.
Handy, commonly debated mantras become engraved in stone because proverbs are how we educate ourselves. Unless an author is fortunate enough to have a formal education in the subject, we must rely on the internet and handy self-help guides to learn the many nuances of the writing craft.
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