A Sleep Storyteller Needs to Be a Little Boring

How do you write something that is so perfectly boring as to be sleep-inducing, but not distractingly, ridiculously boring? 

[Laughs.] You know, I get so many emails from people who are like, “Can you send me the script for your story? I’m really interested in it but I never make it to the end.” And that’s a fantastic accolade as a writer of sleep stories, for someone to say “I can’t get to the end of your story.”

I don’t generally worry about writing sentences that are too boring, but sometimes I have to go back and delete sentences that are too exciting. Say, I did a recent story about the jungles of Madagascar. I was walking through the forest and I remember near where I wanted to end the story, I’d seen a really beautiful python. To me as a travel writer, that’s amazing. I wrote it in the story. And then I was like, oh no. That’s gonna freak some people out when they are trying to drift off. So I had to edit out that snake.

From an Interview by Laura Bennett of Slate with Phoebe Smith, the “sleep-storyteller-in-residence” for the Calm app; Photo by Elizabeth Lies

#sleep #sleeping #night #sleepy #rest #relax #wellness #bed #snooze #calm #slate #mood #travel #peace #photooftheday #instagood #story #stories #thestorybar