Willowmound said:
Do you have a link to something you've written while bored? No? I'd be interested, because I don't believe you.
Believe what you like, but I can't say I've ever written much of anything when I wasn't somewhat bored. For me, writing is an intellectual activeity, not an emotional one.
The pure and simple truth is that "rules" like this are nonsense. If you actually look around, you'll find top professional writers all over the place who hate the act of writing, and who always find it boring. This is simply a fact. And you'll find bazillions of new writers who can't write a grocery list without help who nevertheless get excited each time they write an action scene, who cry each time something sad happens to a character, and who laugh like jackasses whenever they type something "funny."
But readers, including editors and agents, usually find their "exciting" scenes boring, they "sad" scenes maudlin or overly sentimental, and their "humor" about as funny as a baby sliding down a razor blade and landing in a pool of iodine.
Writing is about thinking, not feeling. Reading is about feeling. In fact, writers are run the gamut of emotions while writing are usually the ones who get rejeted most often. And the same ones who experience such a letdown, more emotion, when a rejection slip comes in. They have this really weird notion that because they're excited about a scene, a reader will also be excited. This goes against the first thing most good writers learn in Writing 101.
Just because you like a scene, just because it excites you, in no way, shape, or form means a reader is going to feel the same way. If this were true, then every last time a writer wrote something that excited him, editors would snap it up. They do not.
"If you're bored when writing a scene, the reader will also be bored when reading it" doesn't even make sense of on the surface, and far more likely than not, it's just an excuse to not write exciting scenes when you're bored.
I'd go so far as to say that most good writers don't feel anything when writing. They get in a zone where emotions are turned off completely. They're thinking at 90 miles per hour, but they aren't feeling at all.
Writing is about making something exciting to a character, not to the writer. Readers just do not give a rat's behind how you're feeling when you write a scene, and they shouldn't. Neither should you.
Max Brand once write 27,000 words per day, seven days per week, for an entire year. And in doing so he produced some of the most interesting characters, and some of the most exciting writing anyone has ever done. Do you honestly believed he lived in a state of excitement the whole time?
Humor columnists often have to sit down and write something readers will laugh at the same day a wife leaves for another man, when a toothache is driving them crazy, and when nothing on earth is funny. But readers still laugh. Why? Because the humor writer knows what people find funny, and has the talent to put it down on paper.
A scene doesn't work because it's poorly written. End of story. And how well you write a scene has exactly zilch to do with your emotional state at the time. I can write an exciting scene because I KNOW what readers find exciting, and because I have the TALENT and the SKILL to put that scene down on paper in the proper manner.
If you want to get excited when you read a scene a week after you write it, go ahead. But thinking you have to be excited when you write it is completely out of touch with reality. The emotion the writer is feeling does not make writing good. More often that not, the opposite is true. Talent and skill and thinking make wrtiting worth reading.