Since the start of this Substack and my general inquiries into “The Nature of the Fun” I’ve been plagued by one stubborn question… what is “fun” anyway?
I kept thinking that I knew it when I saw it, but couldn’t actually define it. I assumed that at some point in my exploring this topic I’d stumble onto some kind of answer. But until now I really haven't.
When I say I want my creative work to be “fun,” and that I want my creative process to be “fun”… what does that really mean?
That it be entertaining? Maybe, in part. That it be “funny”? Perhaps, but I also feel sure that “fun” writing is not always synonymous with comedic writing.
Did it need some kind of “lightness” as Italo Calvino defined it? As Zadie Smith described it, was it a pleasure or a joy? David Foster Wallace wrote that he suspected “the Fun” had “something to do with Work as Play” but didn’t give a lot more to go on than that.
After many years and many dissections of many writers’ ideas on the topic, I continued to find myself still grasping for some real sense of what “fun” actually meant.
It turns out, I’m not the only one.
Last month, as I was doing my digital detox, following the steps outlined in Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up With Your Phone, I noticed that her newer book was called The Power of Fun and was aimed at helping adults find ways of creating “fun” in their lives again. In the prologue she talked about her own hunt through medical research, philosophy, sociology, and history, trying to find some satisfying definition of “fun.” She concludes there’s really never been one. (Many studies focus on “happiness” but I agree with Price that this is not the same thing.)
Price’s interest in the topic began when she started taking guitar lessons, one of the things she’d always wanted to do but felt she didn’t have time for, since she was using her precious free hours scrolling on eBay for vintage doorknobs. (Not kidding.)
She tells a story in the Preface to The Power of Fun about arriving at a group guitar lesson, with no idea how to play and no idea what she was doing, nervous as hell, only to find herself swept up in a euphoric feeling she had not even realized she’d been missing for years in her life.
Fun.
Price decided then that using our digital devices for quick serotonin hits was creating a kind of “Fake Fun” in her life that crowded out the “True Fun”—maybe like a junk food diet that fills you up with calories but not ones that are any good for you.
Think about the many things in life that we’d describe as “fun” that really aren’t often so much fun at all: dining out, many social gatherings, preplanned activities, binging television, going apple picking, etc. While I often have quite a lot of fun doing these things, especially with good friends, sometimes it can feel like going through the motions of fun, or trying to recreate something that was fun before.
Price says that when she googled “How to have more fun” she got lists of suggestions including “Roast a turkey” and “watch a documentary” and “put together an altar” to celebrate deceased relatives. She concludes that we really don’t know much about fun at all.
We […] use the word “fun” to describe experiences that we have deemed to be enjoyable (or at least that were supposed to be enjoyable). In this case we use “fun” in the verb sense, “have fun,” as in “I had fun at that picnic” or as an adjective—e.g. “That was a fun time last weekend.” But more often than not we don’t consider whether we actually mean what we are saying.
It seems correct that we do overuse the term, and that often we say things are “fun” when we really mean that they were merely “enjoyable” or, worse, that we know we wanted to enjoy them, but didn’t, and later decide to pretend that we did. We’re often fumbling to find something that will turn out to be fun. Oddly it tends to catch us by surprise when it happens, leading me to wonder if it can really ever be planned, or if it must be spontaneous by its nature?
I ask myself these same questions all the time when it comes to writing—and to reading. I want to say that I’m having fun as I’m working out a scene, but if I’m honest, did I only merely enjoy it? Did I even enjoy it? A lot of times, the answer is no, and the result is that I’ll maintain a lingering dissatisfaction with that scene even after it’s been published. Others will tell me they liked it, enjoyed it. But was it “fun”?
When we read some new book and we know it is supposed to be “good” and we come to the end and think we, maybe, enjoyed it, we tend to think that it was good. But I might never pick that book up again. The ones I go back to, the ones I want to bring into my classes, the ones I wished I’d written… those are something else. Something more. Something fun.
To find out what constitutes True Fun, Price enlists 1500 volunteers, which she calls her “Fun Squad” from all across the world, socio-economic lines, and racial backgrounds. She speaks with people of all ages, those with children, those without, those who are single, and those who are married. She asks them all to write to her to share the last time they did something that they would describe as “so fun”.
Many results that she shares overlap with her own guitar story: people stepping outside of their comfort zone to attend dance classes, drum circles, drawing workshops, etc. There’s newness as well as community, a sense of discovery.
Others describe simpler fun: playing fetch with their dog, a middle school sleepover, going to summer camp. There’s a nostalgia for a better time that was more fun in the past—when they were younger, often in childhood. Fun seems to be something that comes more naturally in youth and then becomes something that we more often deliberately seek out as we get older.
The Fun Squad members also attempt to describe the feeling of fun in their own words, and come up with some familiar terms: freedom, lightness, sunshine, recklessness, laughter, joy, love, etc.
Price next begins to identify some common threads that connect the different responses. She ultimately concludes that for “True Fun” to occur, three conditions need to exist at the same time : Playfulness, Connection, and Flow.
Playfulness means that something is being done for its own sake, without concerns over the outcome. Going to a guitar class after work is playful because it is just about learning to enjoy the guitar. There’s no real goal at the end in mind. There’s no pressure to accomplish something by a certain time. If there were some high-pressure final performance, or a record deal on the line, the playfulness would be affected. It’s about feeling not just free but carefree, liberated from external responsibilities and progress metrics.
Connection means that the person is sharing the experience “with someone (or something) else.” Often this will be another person, and this explains why we often feel like we have more fun when we are with a friend or friends. But you can have Connection with a pet, or even just your environment. It is possible, in Price’s view, to have fun while you’re alone (hiking or rock climbing, maybe?) but she thinks that is not typically where we find it. Those of us who are more introverted will usually find it with one other friend, or in a small group of close friends, rather than in a large crowd.
Flow is used by Price in the usual way that psychologists apply the term to artistic and creative processes (and I’ve written about it before too). Being in a state of flow means that you are focused entirely on the activity, free of distractions. It might be painting, or running, or even having a conversation with someone else, but in any case it is often characterized by having “lost track of time” while the activity was going on. We need to become really absorbed in the activity, without stepping out of it mentally all the time and evaluating it.
Before I try to connect Price’s trifecta to writing and creativity, I want to point out a place where the ideas she presents seem slightly off (to me). One big concern is that she specifically writes that True Fun cannot be had while reading books, binging TV, or watching movies, because we lack that firsthand connection with other people.
Certainly I think some reading/TV/movie experiences are enjoyable but not “fun”—we often consume storytelling on a kind of autopilot. I definitely often watch TV or a movie “in the background” without really paying close attention to it. But I’d argue that in more attentive reading/viewing, where I’m connecting deeply with the characters really can be Fun. When I become emotionally invested, I’m experiencing something that’s at least similar to spending time with living human beings. And Price does say that under her model someone can have Fun while hiking or rock climbing, alone, but in “community” with the world around them.
But I will concede that this becomes a challenge when it comes to having Fun while writing.
If I were a dancer, or an actor, or even a painter—I might often or always engage in my artistic practice in Connection with other actual people. But as a fiction writer this isn’t the case. While there are a handful of truly co-written books, nearly all novels and short stories are written solo.
If we can Connect with characters while reading another book, why can’t we do it with our own characters? Well, I think sometimes we surely do—but it might be a tough call when you’re still bringing them to life on the page. But once you get to a place when your characters begin feeling real then I think it can feel at least comparable to spending time with a living friend.
We want to feel a real human bond with the characters in our work. To feel like our characters “take over” at some point in the process. We say sometimes they have “a mind of their own.” If our own characters can surprise us, the way a friend might in a conversation, or a musical partner might in some jam session, then the Fun is on.
This is, in fact, exactly what I love the most. When my characters become spontaneous even to me, the one writing it. My plan for them goes out the window. I’m improvising so fluidly that I don’t feel entirely in control.
And isn’t this where reading becomes Fun as well? When we find characters acting or speaking in highly surprising ways? And in that moment, don’t I feel an even deeper level of Connection, to the author themselves, as I wonder if they were similarly surprised by the moment I just read? When I wonder how on Earth they came up with it?
I’ll cover this more in the next newsletter, which I’m already plotting, but a great example of this is the George Saunders essay “The Perfect Gerbil” where he discusses the Donald Barthelme story “The School”—reading the essay you get to experience Saunders’s amazement and enjoyment in a kind of “real time” as he moves through the story, beat by beat. It’s not dissimilar to the way he approaches the Russian masters in his craft book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
Perhaps the other way to think about Connection in creative writing, however, is the conversation we have with our audience—whether that’s an imaginary “ideal” reader, or an actual workshop group—it is crucial to the Fun of the process that we are engaged with someone on the other end of the writing. Kurt Vonnegut said that as he wrote he would think about his sister, and keep only the parts he thought she’d like. “Write to please just one person,” he advises us.
So Connection is tricky. But even that alone won’t do it entirely. According to Price’s model, we must have this in addition to Playfulness and Flow.
Now if writers have a challenge when it comes to Connection, maybe we have a leg up on Flow. Being in a state of Flow requires escaping external distractions and becoming lost in our creative tasks. It can be hard to work in a limited window of time, and to shut out the dirty dishes or the chiming notifications on your phone. But because we work alone we aren't also at the mercy of the whims and moods of our collaborators. On the other hand there's no one to whip us into shape but ourselves. This is where things like setting up daily writing times and goals can be helpful, or using external triggers like music (or coffee, or even bathrobes) in a routine that can help accustom our brains to getting into work mode. If you can arrange to be in a certain place at a certain time in similar circumstances on a regular basis, we can train ourselves into a steadier Flow. According to Price’s model, this not only lets us get down to business, but also enables Fun to exist in that creative environment.
Once I was busy editing my novel in a coffee shop (the same one I’m sitting in now as it happens!) and I remembered hearing a kind of commotion around me, but I was so absorbed in whatever sentence I was fixing up that I didn’t even look up. Later, when I mentioned I was working at the cafe that morning to a friend, they said they’d seen me there, but I hadn’t looked up. I apologized, explaining it happened all the time. They said they were surprised how I didn’t even look up when Bill Clinton came in.
“Bill Clinton? The President?” I asked, baffled. I knew he lived in Chappaqua, right up the road from where I was writing, but I hadn’t noticed him coming in.
“Yeah,” my friend said, “He was with like three Secret Service guys. He was standing like six feet from you.”
I’d missed the whole thing.
That’s what Flow can do.
Finally, Playfulness. This seems most obvious, but can also be quite tricky. How do we make ourselves be playful? As soon as we set out to do it, aren’t we not really doing it?
In my classes I will sometimes give fun prompts to my students, random starting points or objectives, to urge them to be spontaneous and to experiment.
I make a point to assure them that the work won't be graded, what’s called “low stakes writing” in pedagogical terms. This all goes in line with Price’s definition nicely.
But I rarely do this sort of thing in my own writing time. Instead I heap pressure on myself with artificial deadlines and stress about finishing things and making sure what I'm writing will “fit” with other pieces of my bigger project.
I worry about wasting time and doing bad work. I'm definitely not focused on being playful. I want to be smart, or seen as smart. I want to be clever, or seen as clever (but not too clever. I want to get to my target word count before my kids need to be picked up from practice. I want to cross the day’s progress off on my To Do list.
But it doesn't have to be that way, right? The best writing I've done has often come from highly random inspirations, where I'm goofing around. (A lot of bad writing happens in these moments too, but it is soon forgotten.) Sometimes I like to write along with my students, and do the same prompts they do.
Lately I've been trying to write more longhand in my journal, which makes it feel more “low stakes.” But I still really dread the need to go back and retype it all, which feels even more like Work than ever. I remind myself that I'm not just mindlessly copying it over, but really making substantial changes.
When I'm doing that, it feels fun again, and I'll realize it's been an hour since I actually looked at the notebook, and I've been improvising quite happily, or working purely from memory.
Recently I read that author Lauren Groff will handwrite whole novel drafts and then put the scribbled version away, typing the whole thing fresh without looking back at the notebooks. It sounds sort of crazy (clearly it works for her) but I can see the appeal for this reason. You get the Playfulness of the exploratory draft, and then you get it all over again in the typing. If it sounds slow, that might be part of the appeal as well. Again, you can't have much fun if you're rushing along to hit a deadline.
There are big holes in all this, of course. It's hard to be playful and experiment when you are squeezing writing time in during a toddler's brief nap, or if you need to get your book finished before your editor loses patience. You can't get into a good Flow when the bills are piling up, the dog needs walking, and someone is about to ticket your car. It's not always easy to feel Connection with your imagined audience, or your characters. And according to Price, it isn't even enough to have only one or two of these conditions at the same time. We need all three, simultaneously.
It's hard to prioritize Fun in creativity. Many times we are often struggling just to be creative at all. But if we work to make those opportunities for Fun, we're going to have an easier time with it, and be happier with the things we're creating.
At the end of the day, I don't know that Price’s model fully captures Fun, and I surely don’t know that Fun can ever be a quantified output of some step-by-step process or the end of an equation. But Price’s model does give us a way of beginning to diagnose which elements are missing from the process at any stage along the way. Instead of floundering and banging our heads against the walls, we can take more direct aim on this elusive quality, and over time we may be able to find Fun more easily again.