Don’t Dismiss The Power of Play

Embracing The Bizarre

My writing companion Belle demonstrating the power of playtime with a catnip sausage…

Hello everyone,

In the most recent article to all of Writing Talk’s subscribers, I talked about what the humble daffodil can teach us about improving our writing in the Discomfort Zone - that place where we take risks and experiment with our writing, and open ourselves up to challenge and potential failure but also to success and advancement.

(If you haven’t read the article yet, then click on the link in the paragraph above and give it a squizz. Go on, it’s okay,  go read it if you haven’t done so already, I’m in no rush, I can wait here for you to get back, take your time…)  

Now, one of the things I mentioned in that post was playfulness and how that can sweeten the deal for writers when it comes from moving from your Comfort Zone to the Discomfort Zone. I wanted to take that a little further here, with some deceptively simple writing exercises based around embracing the bizarre.

And when I say writing exercises, don’t let that put you off. This is very much about finding some joy in your writing, going freestyle, kicking off your shoes, and having fun. It doesn’t matter whether you are not writing much at the moment, in the difficult middle of a big novel, editing a flash fiction story, stranded at the pointy end of a short story.

Writing is not all about an outlining technique, a checklist of appropriate scenery details, the latest writing software package, a scene by scene planner, or narrative arcs neatly jotted down on colour-coded sticky notes. It’s not about how many words you get down in a day, or the methodology of what a character carries in their bag. I mean, it is those things, sometimes. But writing is also just about fucking around a bit, and having some fun without any need to think about the outcome.

Read this extract on A Treatise On Playfulness from Grant Faulkner, Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story:

We’ve arrived at the stage in human history (let’s call it the “Productivoscene era”) where something like play is distrusted. It’s good for kids in preschool. It’s good for adults on the weekends (after they’ve taken care of the yard, shopped for groceries, and hit their cardio goals). It’s good as a creative warm-up. It’s good for team building and bonding. But it’s not something that is at the true center of any “project.” Because that’s not the definition of a project.

Play can’t be tracked and charted. It doesn’t fit into that new novel outlining software you just bought (so it might not be part of writing?). Even though every creator knows its value and espouses taking time for it, it’s exactly that: something we now take time for. That sounds very adult, doesn’t it—to take time, make time, for play.

I’m with Grant on this. This week’s exercise is an easy, breezy, just-sit-down-and-write kind of thing. Don’t worry if you create something utterly unintelligible, just let your imagination rock out. It’s dancing in your pants in the kitchen, it’s sliding down a snowslope on a sledge and just enjoying the pointlessness of the ride. Put your face in the cream cake of nonsense and get messy!