Turning Lemons into Limoncello

I hate mowing my lawn. I hate it with a passion. It sucks. I spent the first 95% of my life lawn free. Now, living in a piece of the country that is green, green, green, I have a lawn to mow. And weeds to kill. And volunteer trees to pull. Yard work really sucks.

So, today when I went out to mow my lawn, I was dreading it.  I hate it, have I mentioned that?

I started mowing, walking back and forth, cutting the grass little by little until I had covered the entire yard.

Then, something hit me. I have all this time, where I can’t do anything else, for my mind to wander. I can let my mind work on my writing, even while my body is doing this godforsaken mowing.

I began to think about the ending to my novel, which had me stymied for over a week now. I thought about the ending to the short story I wrote while I was stymied with my novel. In the course of mowing the lawn, I’d come up with more info for both.

Mowing the lawn had become productive to my writing.

I mowed, thinking about how my characters could resolve the problem I had put before them. How they could give me a satisfying climax to my stories. I was using a miserable task to my advantage.

So now, I have a decent ending to my novel (which I will tweak during revisions), and an ending to my little short story I wrote out of boredom and writer’s block.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I made the most out of what I was given. I took a mundane task, and turned it into something that helped me with my passion. Yay, me!

So, I’m curious, what miserable circumstances do you use to your advantage to think about your writing?