I’m really appreciating the power of passive time in the writing process after revisiting Steph Smith’s Writing is Thinking while gathering my list of writing resources.

Yesterday, I had a classic office afternoon. Which is to say, at 2 pm I was dead tired, had a brain like a bog wrapped in cotton candy, and needed to do anything but work. I decided to try thinking about ideas for posts on this here web-log.

I got nowhere. Clearly. I was at -5 in the tank so cool new ideas were not going to suddenly spring to life.

The fun part was that after having spent 10 minutes of brain soup time yesterday afternoon looking for ideas, this morning I had four or five new ideas come to me. I even got up in the middle of the night to jot one down.

It’s a nice reminder that all creative processes need passive time. Time where things can run in the background. Time where things can come to you. Time that can’t be controlled.