Empty time — sweeping floors, staring out a train window, or pursuing some meticulous, tiresome hobby — is the best way to clear the mind of chatter in order to make room for something new. I spent a lot of time alone when I was a child—unstructured time, without organized activities or other children to play with — and on an almost daily basis I sank into crashing, absolutely stupendous boredoms: lying on the floor and staring in a daze at the leg of a chair, or the quilted diamond-pattern of my toybox, or something like that, for hours on end. (School was far worse — so brutal and tedious that I would sometimes literally depart my body and float near the ceiling, as some primitive shamans are said to do.) And, as far as I’m aware, it was during those hours of boredom — while waiting in a car or staring around a hot, dull classroom or sitting under a garment rack in Goldsmith’s department store — it was during those hours that characters and stories first began to come to me, in a vivid and quite lively way I’m certain they wouldn’t have come had I been blessed with good modern parents who sent me to an artistic school, and filled my spare time with violin lessons and educational games and visits to the children’s museum and things like that. So to parents who want to make artists of their children, I would say: leave them alone. These negative spaces are precisely where aesthetic sense is formed, where the bored little mind turns in on itself, and presto! Spaceships, talking daffodils, entertainment!
— Donna Tartt in “Spirituality in the Modern Novel”
