Make It Fun! Part I
It beats working in the salt mines
better than sex? no, but…
I am told there are people who hate to write. I have trouble believing that, because basically I like writing. Sure, there are times when it’s hard work, exasperating, lonely…frustrating because the words just won’t flow. But for the most part, for me, writing is fun. But then we all have different things that turn us on. I’m not a big fan of horror movies or the Kardashians. They both scare me, and I find modern life scary enough. Yet millions of people seem to like those forms of “entertainment.” To each their own.
I have this theory that many people dislike writing because their first exposure to writing at a tender young age was boring, dogmatic, authoritarian, extreme… perhaps even militant under the oppressive yoke of a stern, taskmaster teacher. Yes, I had a few of those teachers who could have turned me off forever to the joys of writing, but I was also fortunate to have a few teachers who showed me that writing can be enjoyable, from Mr. Anderson in 8th grade who taught us about the basics of how written language works by diagraming sentences, to Mr. Morris in 9th grade who had us writing haiku, to Mr. Fox in 11th grade who taught us about the beauty of romanticism, to Mrs. Schapiro my senior year in high school who turned me on to the brilliant storytelling of the French existentialists. At every stop along the way I learned more and more about the subtle beauty of good writing, and the joys that can be found in learning to write in a way that communicates our deepest thoughts and feelings.
What makes writing fun? Again, we are all different, so each of us will have a different definintion of fun. For some people, fun is being funny, telling jokes, making other people—our ourselves—laugh. For other people fun is a more quiet feeling, a walk in the woods, or curling up in a corner with a good book. Perhaps for those people the right word might be “enjoyable” instead of fun. For some people fun or enjoyment is doing; for others it is watching, or receiving. Some people are turned on by getting up in front of a crowd and performing, others get enjoyment from being in the audience. And for many of us, it is not all black and white; sometimes we like doing, sometimes we like watching. It all depends on our mood.
For some people, joy comes from solving problems. For others, joy comes from a lack of problems. One part of writing I enjoy is when I am presented with a particularly thorny problem of getting a story to work right, whether it’s a book, an article in a magazine or an email to a friend. I may not even be sure what I want to say. That’s part of the process, having a vague notion, a feeling, but not knowing exactly what “it” is. Through the act of writing, thinking, editing, and writing some more, what I want to communicate slowly comes into focus, like a potter shaping the clay on their wheel. Those are the moments when I feel triumph, the joy of a problem solved, a challenge overcome. For me, that part of writing is fun.
Another part I find enjoyable is going back and reading some of my old work. Sometimes it is fun to do because I read a particularly good sentence or passage and think, “Wow, I wrote that, and it’s actually very good. I’m a good writer.” Other times reading my old scrivenings is enjoyable because the writing is so bad, and I think, “Wow, look at how far I have come, look at how much better I am as a writer today, I guess I have learned a few things.”
You don’t have to be a published author for this kind of looking back. Sometimes I read my old diaries or travel journals or letters I wrote to friends (since I mostly write on my laptop, I have copies of much of my correspondence, although I also have family members and friends who have given me back letters I wrote to them longhand years ago). If you haven’t deleted them, you can read old emails. (I highly recommend not deleting any writing on your computer. Modern storage is incredibly cheap and backup so easy with cloud computing. Words take up so little storage space compared to photos and videos that there is no reason to delete written files.)
A few years ago when my kids were in junior high school I informed them that we were going out of our house and onto a sailboat full time. I had no idea how they would take this news, and I spent weeks working up my best fatherly presentation. When the day came I sat them down and told them what we were doing, and gave them all the good reasons (or so I thought) for making this momentous change: they’d learn teamwork, nature, family, resilience, leadership, and on and on. After I was done my younger son looked at me and said, “You forgot one thing dad.” I semi-panicked, wracking my brain for what I could have missed. “We’re doing it to have fun, right?” I had to laugh at myself: yes, we were also doing it to have fun. Writing is like that. Even if you’re writing something serious, from a book to a love letter, stop for a moment and find that youthful, exuberant voice in your head that reminds you to have fun with your writing.
