I've Been Here Before (how about you?)
What is the "Fun" and how do we find our way back to it?
Drew Coffman, Writer’s Block 1
Today’s Writing Music: “Clementine” by Sarah Jaffe
Today’s Reading: “Stillness” (essay) from Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter
I’ve just finished work on a new novel, which means, in some combination, my last several months have been a free-for-all of redrafting, editing, panicking, sleeplessness, more editing, existential despair, more redrafting, nail-chewing, and even more editing. And then more editing. And then more panicking. (Last time, I ended up in the hospital briefly with kidney stones, that I blame on the gallons of coffee I was consuming at the time.)
Trips to the ER notwithstanding, if you’re someone who loves to write, you probably know this feeling. What starts out as a freewheeling, exhilarating dive into your imagination and a whole universe of creative possibilities, will always end up with hours agonizing about overusing em-dashes.
At some point all the Fun stuff is done, and you’re left with the hyper-specific, nitty gritty, super-picky stuff. (Like not saying the same thing three times in a row). You want every line in every scene to be as clean and perfect as possible, because any remaining flaw feels destined to be the reason cited for rejection. And at the very least they’ll keep you up at night in the meantime. What starts off as Play has become Work.
And this is all well and good, I feel. Writing novels is supposed to be hard. I want it to be hard. Like a marathoner approaching the 26th mile, I want to dig in and push and surprise myself a little in the homestretch. So that whatever else happens, I’ll know I’ve given it my best shot.
Still—as that finish line approaches, it’s natural to take stock of the shin splints, your the sore nipples, the stabbing lung pain, and maybe even collapse exhausted onto the sidewalk while swearing that you will never again so much as run after the mailman for the rest of your life.
This is fine.
I was taught that if I truly loved writing (or running, in this analogy) I just had to trust that sooner or later I’d get myself back to the starting line again. And for a long time, it always did… but now I know that this doesn’t always just happen naturally over time.
Sometimes you need to find your way back to the Fun again.
Shortly after finishing a previous novel, I found myself stuck in this purgatory—too shell-shocked by the process to remember what I loved about writing in the first place. When I got up in front of my students each week I was able to suitably fake my enthusiasm, but when I sat down in front of my laptop, I couldn’t put two words together.
It was in this confused state that I ran across an essay by David Foster Wallace called “The Nature of the Fun” — after his death it was posted for a while on the PEN America site (though it is not there anymore). You can find it in his posthumous essay collection Both Flesh and Not and it is in the David Foster Wallace Reader as well.
(Hang on. Maybe you like David Foster Wallace, and maybe the combination of those three names in that sequence causes you to run screaming. It’s OK, I promise. I’m not that guy, I swear. I enjoy his work; lots of people don’t. That’s totally fine. You don’t need to be a crazy DFW fan for the rest of this to work, I promise promise promise.)
I’ve previously written about “The Nature of the Fun” for The Center for Fiction if you want a deeper dive, but the blog version is that Wallace puts his finger on a common problem for any writer who takes their work somewhat seriously: many of us are initially attracted to writing because it is a thrilling, freeing, and even rebellious form of self-amusement and self-expression, but one that is initially mostly a private joy.
Then as we fall in love with the act of writing, we begin to take it more seriously. We start reading stories and novels and poems and plays not just to enjoy them, but to take them apart and figure out how they work. We start thinking about writing all the time. Pushing ourselves harder and harder, setting farther goals for ourselves, tackling new challenges, trying on new techniques. Eventually this becomes a kind of “work as play” as he calls it—and then we begin sharing it with others.
And this is good, he says, because art is meant to be shared. If it expresses something, we need someone to express it to. (…to whom to express it? That can’t be right.)
Maybe that’s just a few friends, maybe it’s a professor, maybe it’s a workshop room of other writers, maybe its strangers and acquaintances reading a blog like this one. And maybe we eventually work so hard and get so lucky that we see our work published by some reputable outfit somewhere.
What happens next? Do we retire and die happy?
No, we receive criticism. Some of it positive and encouraging, some of it helpful and constructive, and some of it downright unhinged and harmful. Now we write with an audience in mind, and it changes us like itty-bitty particles in the thrall of the Heisenberg Effect.
We try to write more of what people liked, less of what people didn’t. Taken over months and years, we might see ourselves improving even beyond our initial expectations—but meanwhile our priorities have shifted. We’re thinking more about whether our work gets approval than whether or not we approve of it. We lose sight of that free, anarchic Fun that drove us to the page (and paradoxically that made our stuff worth reading!) in the first place.
Trust me when I say, Madness this way lies.
Wallace’s essay does a fine job of diagnosing this problem, but he’s frustratingly vague when it comes to proposing a solution. He urges us to embrace the things we fear are most hideous about ourselves, and which we want most to hide from criticism.
This might be the right roadmap for finding something honest and true to write about next, but I’m not sure it leads us to Fun, exactly. (In Wallace’s case, it led to him writing Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which I guess was the kind of hideous fun that suited him.)
So in the years that followed, I’ve set out to gather more advice on this topic from other authors that I admire, all of whom have struggled with this same conundrum, to see what they can share about the road back to Fun… beginning first and foremost with remembering what that Fun actually looks and feels like when we encounter it.
I’ve been digging around in letters, diaries, and essays by Zadie Smith, Italo Calvino, Elizabeth Gilbert, Octavia Butler, Haruki Murikami… and many more, looking for clues as to how these writers kept, and continue to keep, that spark of Fun alive in their work.
What is Fun exactly? I’m hoping that, over the course of these posts I’ll be able to guide us towards better definitions. But for now, let’s clear up one thing: Fun ≠ frivolous, or especially humorous writing. Sometimes it isn’t even fun… or usually it is not entirely.
As an example: my last novel, Why We Came to the City, was built around my real experiences around the illness and death of my younger sister. Not fun. My new novel is about, among other things, suicide and politics… not fun either. I didn’t choose these topics because I thought they would be especially fun to write about. I chose them (or they chose me?) because they were what I needed to say something about.
But what I’ve found is that these not-so-fun things necessitate finding the Fun even more.
How else do we get ourselves to face hard and serious things? Along with some shared grief and longing, I’d hope that any reader of either book walks away with a sense that they also enjoyed reading it. And that I had fun writing it. That joy and generosity were in every word and sentence, even amidst the tragedies they were describing.
My hope with this newsletter is to share with my readers, every few weeks, a little more of the Nature of the Fun, and some thoughts on how to re-center it in our writing lives. In the course of that, I’ll address some of the many Sucky Things about this vocation (and how to overcome them). And I’ll share some of my own writing too, as we go, as well as some ideas that can help get you writing towards Fun too.
Here’s one to get us started:
Writing Towards Fun #1 - Go outside. (Wear your mask). Bring along an ordinary notebook and plant yourself somewhere that you can safely observe other people: a park, the bench outside of the local courthouse, wherever. If you, like me, don’t have a ton of time to just sit around, that’s OK! Bring your notebook with you to whatever otherwise boring thing you have to do—attend a department meeting, watch your kid take a swimming lesson, or standing in line waiting for your eye exam. (I did this recently while standing on line to get my vaccine shot.)
Take notes on everything and anything that happens. Who do you see? What do you smell? Is anything odd or interesting happening? What are the people nearby talking about? Cast a wide net here and go for all the senses you can (but don’t lick things). You don’t have to worry about the writing yet, or to organize this in any way at all—just sponge it all up for as long as you can—aim to fill about two pages.
Later, sit down with your notes and begin writing a scene. A first person narrator may be easiest here, and some will want to stay in the present tense. That’s fine, but you can do this in third person, or past tense as well. Nothing needs to happen in this scene—your only task here is to take the things you collected up and begin arranging them in some pleasing way. You’re collaging. That’s all. If you start to notice themes or connections between some of these elements, run with it. If you start to wander into backstory or memory, that’s OK too.
There are two goals here: one is to just get yourself writing something again, and the other is to remind ourselves that life is happening around us all the time. There’s potential energy everywhere, and you can harness it anytime you turn your attention towards it.
There’s Fun to be had again, if we just set our sights on that alone for a little while.
Check out Zen In The Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury, a book of his essays on writing. It's right up your alley! To quote the first essay 'The Joy Of Writing:'
"Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvasses. These are the children of the gods. They knew fun in their work. No matter if creation came hard here and there along the way, or what illnesses and tragedies touched their most private lives. The important things are those passed down to us from their hands and minds and these are full to bursting with animal vigor and intellectual vitality. Their hatreds and despairs were reported with a kind of love."
You can find it free if you google the title and "Bradbury" and "PDF"!
This is a great idea for a newsletter. I found you from your Unfinished Business essays btw.