After a night of procrastinating online, I click – with a load of frustrations – YES when Word asks me if I want to save changes to this document. After all, it’s a bloody 30 words.
Yet, if I don’t write at all, which you’d think would spare me a lot of frustrations, my ideas gather in crazy nightmares. So I write.
But why does it take me a holiday and scribbling on scraps of paper to remind me how much fun it is to write?
Growing up, I was the story-telling girl. I made the mistake of thinking that I could easily become an author because of that in my early teens. That’s when the deadline-fear and writer’s block-anger blossomed. I started hating the book I was working on. I kept editing it and re-writing it because that was less horrible than not seeing that small word count thingy change. In the end it took me twelve years to finish that one.
Several times during the years I decided that I didn’t even wanted to be an author. It would be hard to make it happen, you would have to let other people read your stuff and I simply didn’t want to be ruled by “Write At Least 5000 Words A Day.” But after every decision I would stumble on an article about “How To Turn Into a Published Writer,” or “Don’t Call Yourself A Writer, Be A Writer,” and I would scuttle off to a new document again.
While I could easily write 10.000 words a day for a fanfictional story and enjoy every minute of it, or crank out seven rp posts in an hour, I continued to be cranky about my “real” work. What was wrong with me if I could produce, but not create?
Not everything you write down is worth international publication and a Pulitzer (wouldn’t it be scary if it would be?).
You write to get something of your mind, to create a (fragment of a) world, to share your opinion. Do not forget the joy of puzzling with words, the satisfying click of a wonderful sentence, the FYEAH when the story turned out better than it was in your head. Enjoy and surprise yourself, because it is so much fun.
I wrote large parts of this post on scraps while going to bed. It’s a special feeling to let some ideas escape in pencil scribbles at the end of your day. Maybe that’s one of the biggest fun killers: the blinking cursor.
Still need to get your write fun sparkle going? Find support in our writing groups: Writers-unite and Nano-and-beyond. For the next four weeks I will post every Wednesday a completely random, silly and definitely not publication-worthy writing challenge in those groups. Because writing is FUN!
11 replies on “Don’t Forget to Have Fun: The Writing Edition”
Whoop yeah writing:) I added to the thing I’m working on yesterday for the first time in a few weeks so this is timely:)
And if MS Word hates you, I love Scrivener. It saves automatically. LOVE.
Oh man, I need this too right now too. As much as I am trying to be a little more professional about my writing and shake off not-finished-itus, the instant I get too serious, my ideas dry up.
I know right? How horrible is that? And yet I continue to tell myself ‘This is going to be the book’, ‘This will be the article’ and effectively kill all excitement.
This was a really great post. Thanks.
You like it? Yay!
Well, I love this. It’s a great reminder!
Hurrah! Now to practice what I preach.
Aw, I needed to read this. Thank you so much for writing it! I’m very much not the “X words per day” kind of person. My life simply isn’t gracious enough to allow for that, but it is so, so helpful to remember to have fun and I’ve been reinvigorated by writing just a few hundred words, say, on some random idea. And notes! Nothing quite like a notebook and pen to soothe the mind.
Yes, notes are so important for me. I’m still holding out for something that takes away the horror from retyping your notes, or else I might have been producing books for decades, instead of three years. The crispness of an empty page is somehow an invitation, while that vile empty file is a threat.
This sounds awesome! I had the same problem; when I was a kid especially, my head was filled with stories, and at nine years old I got the grand old idea of becoming a professional writer. That lasted a few years, but toward the end I couldn’t seem to get myself to write stories anymore. I became super-critical about my own work.
The plus side from all that experience is that even in academic papers, I know how to turn a phrase and (hopefully) not write with the dull, drab voice I’ve seen in so many essays/books in the field. The negative side is, unless it’s an assignment, I can’t seem to do it. I have an idea I’ve been sitting on for the last few years, but all I’ve managed to do are a few false starts.
Setting goals to remind oneself that writing should be fun and awesome sounds like an excellent idea.
Well, ‘setting goals’ is a risky phrase in this context , but I completely understand what you meant ;-)