The Discipline of Stillness: On Boredom and Attention

Boredom is usually treated as a problem that fiction must solve. It appears in craft advice as a failure of pacing, a warning sign that the writer has lingered too long without sufficient conflict or plot movement. Yet some of the most enduring works of literature do not eliminate boredom so much as inhabit it. They allow monotony, repetition, and stalled desire to become the very conditions under which meaning emerges.

In this sense, boredom is not the absence of drama but a different register of attention. When little happens, the mind turns inward or sideways. It begins to notice texture, rhythm, and minute shifts in feeling that would be drowned out by constant action. Writers such as Flaubert understood this well. Madame Bovary does not rush Emma toward catastrophe. Instead, it immerses the reader in the dullness of provincial life, where days resemble one another and longing has nowhere to go. The novel’s emotional force depends on that accumulation of sameness. Without it, Emma’s restlessness would lack weight.

A similar dynamic appears in the work of Alberto Moravia, whose characters often exist in states of moral and emotional inertia. In novels like The Conformist, boredom becomes a social and political condition. The flatness of experience mirrors a deeper ethical numbness. What matters is not what happens next but how long nothing happens, and what that duration reveals about a person’s inner life.

More recently, Annie Ernaux has shown how boredom can serve as a tool of radical honesty. Her pared-down prose resists embellishment. She documents routine, repetition, and waiting with a precision that refuses consolation. The effect is not tedious but exacting. The reader is asked to stay present with experiences that are usually skipped over, especially those associated with women’s lives, domestic labor, and social marginality.

For many emerging writers, however, boredom on the page feels dangerous. It raises the fear that a reader will disengage or that the work will be dismissed as uneventful. A creative writing mentor can help distinguish between inert writing and something more deliberate. These two states can look similar at first glance, yet they arise from very different artistic intentions.

In workshop settings, passages of quiet are frequently flagged as places to cut or compress. While this advice can be useful, it can also flatten work that relies on periods of stillness. A mentor who reads attentively will ask different questions. They might ask what kind of attention the scene is training in the reader, or whether the boredom being depicted belongs to the character, the narrator, or the writer. These distinctions matter. When boredom is unconscious, it drains energy. When it is intentional, it generates energy.

Mentorship also helps writers trust material that does not announce its importance. Many drafts fail not because they lack drama, but because the writer abandons subtle material too early. A mentor can encourage patience. They can point out patterns that only become visible over time, such as repeated gestures, recurring thoughts, or the slow erosion of hope. These patterns often form the emotional spine of work that resists conventional plot.

There is also an ethical dimension to writing boredom. To stay with the unremarkable requires respect for lived experience as it is actually felt. This is especially true for writers working with autobiographical or autofictional material. A mentor can help a writer resist the urge to retroactively dramatize their past. Instead of imposing narrative excitement, the mentor can help shape a form that honors the texture of waiting, repetition, and endurance.

This does not mean that boredom excuses shapelessness. On the contrary, writing that engages boredom successfully often demands rigorous control. Flaubert’s sentences are meticulously balanced. Ernaux’s prose is stripped to its essentials. The restraint is intentional. A mentor can help a writer see where restraint is functioning as a discipline and where it has slipped into vagueness or avoidance.

In practical terms, working with boredom as material often involves revision choices that feel counterintuitive. It may mean keeping a scene that seems uneventful but carries tonal weight. It may mean cutting moments of overt drama that dilute a more subtle emotional current. These decisions are easier to make with an experienced reader who understands what the work is trying to do, rather than what it is expected to do.

Boredom invites a different relationship between writer and reader. It asks the reader to slow down and accept uncertainty. It asks the writer to trust that meaning can arise without spectacle. A creative writing mentor helps hold that trust in place, especially when doubt sets in. In a culture that prizes constant stimulation, writing boredom becomes a quiet act of resistance. It insists that attention itself has value. When shaped with care, boredom does not repel the reader. It draws them closer, asking them to notice what usually goes unseen.