Idleness & Creativity—A Roundtable Chat

A Long Walk, A Boring Drive, A Dream—Sometimes the Muse Strikes When We Least Expect It

By Mary Kay Andrews, Kristin Harmel, Kristy Woodson Harvey & Patti Callahan Henry

“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.—Virginia Woolf.” 

MKA:  Sometimes, I’m sprawled out on the sofa in my sunroom, staring out the window, at a cheerful cardinal, or a squirrel, or one of the dogs chasing a squirrel, and my husband will wander in and ruin my whole book by pointing out that we’re out of eggs, or “someone” needs to wash a load of laundry.

To him, I’m loafing, or in the words of my late grandmother Edna Mae, “fiddle-farting around.” But the reality is, while my body seems relaxed, my subconscious is whirring away, dredging up bits of dialogue, action or motivation. 

But the reality is, while my body seems relaxed, my subconscious is whirring away, dredging up bits of dialogue, action or motivation.

He’s an engineer, you see, a man of action, and as such, my inaction signals procrastination, at best, or sloth at worse. To his mind, if I’m not scribbling in one of my composition books, or my fingertips aren’t racing over the keyboard on my laptop, that looming book deadline is about to get blown. Big time.

As a creative type, I do some of my best work when it looks like I’m not working at all. Sometimes, when I’m tethered to my laptop, under pressure to produce my two-thousand a day word count, my mind freezes up and what I produce is just meaningless blather, space fillers with no value to my story.

But if I walk away from my desk, maybe perform some meaningless, repetitive task, I can trick my mind into coming up with the good stuff. And it happens when I least expect it. Decades ago, I spent weeks and weeks hand-stripping varnish off the blackened cove molding in our 1920s-era dining room. Every night, after my kids were in bed, I’d clamber onto my makeshift scaffolding and scrape away, measuring my progress in inches. But along the way, my mind, freed up from my “real work” would busy itself with solving the mystery I was trying to plot.

I used to know a writer who thought of her creative subconscious as “the girls in the basement.” She said when she needed them most, she’d send a bat signal to the girls, and eventually, they’d produce the goods. So ladies, what do you think?

KWH: MKA, I totally agree with this. I heard once that the reason you should skip a test question you’re stuck on and come back to it later is that, even when you aren’t fully working on solving the problem, your subconscious is. Amazing! I think our creativity is the same way. When I let myself have a few days of quiet vacation away from the computer, the texts, the deadlines, I am almost always flooded with ideas. And yet, I have such a hard time convincing myself that this time is good and productive and necessary! Even when we know our most creative moments can be found away from our desks, it somehow doesn’t quite feel like working. Why are we like this?!   

When I let myself have a few days of quiet vacation away from the computer, the texts, the deadlines, I am almost always flooded with ideas.     

PCH: Exactly Kristy! Sometimes I feel guilty taking time away from my desk even