by Lisa Hiton
As a child, I was very self-entertained. Whether reading a book, going on a long stroll through my backyard or organizing my desk drawer, every task or hobby became an obsession—a time for me to dwell in my interior world with no cause for consequence or disruption.
My mother reminisces about how simple it was to plop me down on the beach with a shovel while I dug little rivers for hours without asking for anything. But she also talks about how it was impossible to do anything quickly with me as a kid. What she and a friend hoped would be a brisk twenty minute stroll through a park turned into a two hour endeavor watching me as I walked on my own assessing every stick, stone, gum wrapper, leaf, and objet trouve to determine if it was a treasure.
Introversion seems to some like aloofness or arrogance. While this might be true in some cases, it seems a more astute assessment that introverts gain energy from within—from the inner life.
Understanding myself as an introvert has been increasingly helpful in my writing life because it allows me to explain to my friends, family, peers, and students that being alone is very fueling for me. And being alone is not the same as being lonely. For a writer, downtime—especially downtime in which daydreaming can occur, can yield pages and pages of writing gold.
The Teen Introvert in Schools
Teachers and parents often worry about students who aren’t “engaged” during class—the student who raises their hand less, doodles while a lecture is going on, or prefers to listen while glancing out the window. In a world full of achievement pressure and an interest in “measurables”, a notebook of immaculate doodles and typography may seem to an adult as though a child is uninterested, not paying attention, or falling behind in a given class. On the contrary, many of these teens—like you and me—are actually having a much more metacognitive and reflective experience than meets the eye.
While American schools are cutting cursive in favor of coding and technology classes, Japanese students continue to practice the art of shodo, or calligraphy. Studies show that practices of writing and drawing by hand cause more cognitive processes than simply typing notes. From cross-motor functions to deductive reasoning, more and more studies show that students who take notes in longhand have a better memory for and deeper understanding of the information covered during class. Further, when the mind is bored, studies find that those who doodle their way through the boredom can retain about 30% more than those who try to focus on something that the mind has already decided to avoid. I even had a brilliant theater director who encouraged me to use my thumbnail to lightly prick my fingertips if I forgot a line. It worked every time. The nerves in the hands have a direct means of reaching your mind and making it alert again.
Famous Introverts
Albert Einstein: While Einstein is known for his contributions to math and science, it’s important to note that Einstein’s seminal works on relativity came from a daydream—more specifically, a gedankenexperiment. Because scientific technologies had not caught up to Einstein’s ideas, he created this specific, focused daydream—this “thought experiment”—to very clearly draw out the circumstances that would prove relativity to be true. Einstein’s theories are written as stunning, dense prose in which he talks about standing on the ground watching a train pass. He goes through every part of the experience a passenger on the train has in relation to the viewer standing on a platform. Page after page of description. All from a daydream.
The Brontë Sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne all used daydreams to construct the imagined worlds of Gondal and Angria. The sisters and their brother filled hundreds of tiny notebooks with tales of these two fabricated lands, the seeds of which became Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Orhan Pamuk: When receiving the Puterbaugh Literary Prize in 2006, Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk, said he “longed for inspiration to come to [him]”. Being open to “the muse” is a longstanding tradition for many writers from Ancient Greece until now. Daydreaming is not an idling away of time, but a being open to what wisps of an image or an idea may come to you and allowing the time and patience to honor this process.
Archimedes: Yes, even in ancient times, daydreaming led to miraculous discoveries—the original “Eureka!” moment, even! Tasked with finding out if the king’s crown was made of pure gold or if the goldsmith had diluted it with some silver, Archimedes got in a bathtub and saw the water level rise. Naked, he ran through the streets shouting “Eureka!” as he realized he could measure the volume of the crown in the same fashion.
Ideas and Tool for Introverts
Google doodle inspired by the works of abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky (via Wallpaper)
Whether or not you are an introvert, there are many lessons we can learn from introverts about how idle time can fuel novels, scientific discovery, and in general, a deeper relationship with memory. It’s not so easy to take an aimless walk if you don’t live near Walden Pond, let alone if you have many hours of homework to do after school. However, we can all cultivate new hobbies and change our routine—especially as it relates to technology—as a means of increasing our engagement with our inner life and the ideas found there, which in turn, might just move from that effervescent air of the mind to embody words on a page.
In a world where opposites attract, I recommend that instead of eradicating our time-wasting/bad habits outright, we might first think of the hobbies we’d like to add to our daily routines. Once we become more attached to those, the other distractions will fall by the wayside more authentically. Here are some pairings that can help writers improve their engagement to ideas and writing:
In the Habit of Doodling
Like the experiment seen earlier, when you’re tempted to reach for your phone to play a round of candy crush or check Instagram, instead grab a pen. You’ll have to remind yourself at first, but eventually grabbing the pen will feel as automated as reaching for your phone. So if you’re a doodler, let yourself doodle. There needn’t be any structure or goal to having a pen in your hand than to let the elegant cross motor skills of your hands interact with the page.
Take a Walk
As we considered this past February, walking has a long tradition for writers and thinkers. Energy can come from memories and ideas. Like doodling for your whole body, you can spend that 30-40 minutes of “down time” before you start your homework strolling rather than gaming. You needn’t prompt your thinking. Just let the blankness fill itself with whatever comes your way. There doesn’t need to be a plan to write—use the time to let the culture and nature around you impress itself upon your consciousness.
It's Okay to Daydream
Studies show that daydreamers are more creative than others. In a culture that’s increasingly obsessed with information overload, it’s becoming more and more difficult to daydream without someone or something telling you that you must focus on something else. Yet, daydreaming can lead to great ideas. The mind, when given some time and space, can walk you into your next great story, philosophical idea, or spiritual connection. So, alleviate yourself from social media. This doesn’t mean you have to go completely off the grid—after all, we’d miss you here at Write the World! However, daydreaming—like reading and writing—cannot be done with split attention. Build in regular time when you’re away from your screens. You might also reflect (in writing) about how this makes you feel. I feel less despair when I stay away from social media for so many reasons. Finding days and times to stay away from it entirely has become a very healthy habit for all aspects of my life.
How Do These Activities Help Writers?
So, dear writers, now that you understand the proven benefits of daydreaming and doodling, it’s important to think about how they can enrich your writing life. The idea is not to routinize these things so that they become pragmatic as other subjects, chores, and life tasks come to take up time and energy. Rather, the act of daydreaming requires a bit more vulnerability and slowness despite the pace and pressure of today’s modern world.
All of these tasks are to lend yourself to “the muse”—that mystical goddess of literature and music. Whether I stare out the window of my kitchen into the woods, or go outside and walk towards it, when done alone and in silence, that muse of literature seems to send lightning my way—sometimes I hear a line or title, other times, I’m graced with a blue heron, ducklings, or a coyote. Whether something comes or not, you must be open to the world—its people, creatures, trees, complications, changes, weather, and challenges—so you can be a conduit to translating it into your own language.
About Lisa
Lisa Hiton is an editorial associate at Write the World. She writes two series on our blog: The Write Place where she comments on life as a writer, and Reading like a Writer where she recommends books about writing in different genres. She’s also the interviews editor of Cosmonauts Avenue and the poetry editor of the Adroit Journal.