Sunshine and Chasing Your Tail, or Having Fun in the Muddled Middle

Each day as I sit down to write, my Bengal boys remind me with their antics that there is more to life than the driven work-ethic I seem to have inherited from my Victorian ancestors. (And that’s interesting given I’m Swedish and Polish. Hmm.) As I poise my fingers over the keyboard the two of them decide that it’s time to play.

I have one yelling at me from the floor or sitting on top of the back of my chair rubbing and purring into my ear. The other one (Shiva) manages to squeeze himself between my belly and the desk and knead my chest as he purrs. Of course, if that doesn’t get enough of my attention, then there is stealing thumb tacks off my corkboard (so I chase them before they swallow the darn tacks), or just being cute knocking things off shelves. Or, if there is a shadow, chasing their tails.

Fun all of it. And, if I take five minutes away from the dreaded manuscript, I have fun too,  and go back to my manuscript refreshed and ready to play. Which brings me to my topic for this post, which is playing as you write.

I’ve mentioned previously how important it is to listen to your muse and not get caught up in the business of writing, but today I saw a video posted that reinforced something my mentors Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith have said again and again:

Go have fun.

The video presents how having fun encouraged the public to do something that previously they’d avoided doing – climbing the stairs. By making the stairwell into a musical keyboard, people’s behavior changed. So what does this mean for writers?

It means that when we hit one of those horrible twisted parts of a manuscript where we don’t want to sit down at our desk, we need to find the way to have fun again.

Some writers play tricks with themselves, timing themselves to see how many words they can get in the shortest time possible. Some of them reward themselves with chocolate. I prefer to think about the place where I first found the love of writing. I’ll turn on music and just write for fun, writing about the character, the situation, the emotion I want to evoke. I remember that writing is first and foremost for myself. If I’m not entertained, then no one else will be. And often this is enough to break me through.

Having fun means we regain our inner child, and stop telling ourselves we can’t say things this way or do things that way. I’ve been readying the manuscript of Judas Kiss . Reading it over, I was delighted to find I’d had so much fun writing it that the fun came through. I had fun characters, even though the situation I put them in was dire and that made me care about them.

So quit worrying as you write. Just write, have fun, and I’ll bet you’ll find that you get that manuscript moving again. And if you’ve had fun writing, maybe you’ll be ready for more — just like my Ben in the sunshine — still chasing his tail.