Are you having fun?

Hi, friends.

It’s your on again off again newsletter pal. I hope you are well. I’m in the home stretch of a semester that’s felt simultaneously very long and extremely short. There’s a stack of grading to do, but it’s no longer endless. There’s nothing left to fret over. There is just the finishing. There is a kind of Make-it-Work energy that exists at the end of the semester I need to bottle. Yesterday, I was grading research papers. They are long and tedious and I try to do five a day—it shrinks the stack without causing despair. I’d graded two that were meh and wanted to stop. But I opened the third to see if it was going to be an easy grade or not. In the comment section, where students generally vent their frustrations about why they can’t get their margins right or why it’s an hour late, was this message: Prepare to be Amazed! I’m sure you could hear my laughter a block away. Was it amazing? Not so much. But the writer brought more energy to the essay than the two lifeless ones that proceeded it.  

In between grading, I have begun to think in earnest about my summer writing plans now that they are getting closer. At the beginning of last week, I re-read Aimee Bender’s essay on making a contract with a friend. I started doing writerly math. If I work X hours a day, and focus on Y problem the month of May, and Z problem in June, then surely I’ll be finished (but For Real this time!). I was deep in my planning when that nervous little itch presented itself. Could I really get it done? It seemed, suddenly, that there was so much to do. That it might be impossible (yet again).

Later in the week, I stumbled upon a conversation about high-stakes writing and how writers put too much pressure on themselves to get it perfect, instead of, you know, just having fun and playing. Ding. Ding. Ding. My brain lit up like a pinball machine. Perhaps what I needed was not a rigorous plan (which, if we’re being honest, I will abandon mid-May and then feel like a failure afterwards) but a way to put FUN back into the process.

Jackson Pollock’s Shimmering Substance

Pollock says this about painting: When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. ...I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

When did writing become a chore and stop being fun? Somewhere along the finishing way, I got my cart before my horse and started thinking about business of publishing. I wanted to be finished. And I thought this would spur me that direction. It has had the opposite effect. It has made me doubt myself. It has stifled my creativity. If you’ve been reading these notes for a while, you know about my word count issue. I have an over-abundance, according to lots of people who give advice on querying and matters of the marketplace. So I need to trim. But worrying about word count has closed me off in revision. Everything became about subtracting and that’s not the mindset I need to make the best possible version of the book. I need to be open during revision and see the seedlings I’ve already planted, move them to the right spot and nourish them. My scenes get better when I add another character, another tension, another possibility. Will I have to confront this word count issue down the road? Maybe. But that’s a publishing problem. Not a writing problem. Right now, we’re going to focus on finishing by adding more fun to the process.

Maybe that means going down all the rabbit holes. Maybe that means throwing spaghetti to the wall to see what sticks. Maybe that means taking myself less seriously. (I just finished reading a book that was trying *so hard* to be literary and quirky, the life was squeezed out of the characters. But the book I just picked up isn’t concerned with that. It just wants to tell a good tale and in doing so, it made my hands sweat this morning.) It means not losing the magic, as described here by George Saunders on the best writing advice he received:

Once, when I was a student, I cornered my mentor and hero Tobias Wolff at a party and assured him that I had sworn off comedic sci-fi and was now writing “real literature.” I think he sensed, correctly, that 1) this was not an attitude that was going to produce my best work but 2) there was going to be no arguing me off of that position (only time could do that). So he just said, “Well, good. Just don’t lose the magic.”

Which I then proceeded to go off and do, for about four years. The “advice” part of that came home on the day I made the breakthrough that would lead to my first book—that is, when the magic (finally) came back. The new writing was fun and (see above) ostensibly entertaining—it came out of a place of joy and orneriness, instead of a place of stiffness or control or pedanticism. And to suddenly recall his advice at just that moment was a sort of force-accelerator, and I’ve never forgotten that, for me, “magic” has to be the operative word—getting the prose to go somewhere and do something you couldn’t have foreseen at the outset.

Piet Mondrian New York City I

So, how to recapture the magic? How to have fun? How to prepare myself for amazement? Maybe it means making a playlist of songs for my characters. Maybe it means giving myself more constraints. Maybe it means playing around with form. Maybe it means more naps and ice cream and schmancy notebooks to doodle in. It probably means unfollowing the agents and advice givers. Does knowing how many queries they received and how few fulls they requested help me? No. No, it does not. It only sows the seeds of doubt. Perhaps it means giving myself prompts. Or going on artist dates. Or getting myself a writing partner and sending funny gifs to them at the end of the day.

Maisey reminds me that my fun need not be expensive or elaborate. She is never more thrilled than when she gets a new tennis ball. Though she has so, so many. In every color. Some made just for dogs. Some that squeak. Some that roll instead of bounce. Some are spoils collected on our walks. One that’s slick instead of fuzzy. I wish I was as happy about anything as she is on new ball day. She carries it in her mouth all through the neighborhood. As if to say, look suckers, at who got a new ball today. For days she’ll pounce on it and rub it with her ears to make it hers.

Other tidbits.

Need a poem? Each weekday in April, you can call FSG and someone will read a poem to you. 385-342-5374

Perhaps you are in a different spot than I am and do want to know the ins and outs of querying and proposals and all of it. Agent Eric Smith’s got lots of resources for you.

Still: The Journal is open to Appalachian writing through April 30. Hex is open to uncanny and weird flash pieces through April 30. A boatload of closures May 1: Bayou, Prairie Schooner, Yalobusha (nonfiction only), Denver Quarterly.

I’m also thinking about ways to have more fun with the newsletter. I don’t know what that might look like just yet. But if there’s something you’d like to see, let me know.

That’s it from here scribblers. I’ve got five papers to grade this afternoon and then some fun to put on the page. What about you? Let me know how you put fun back into your writing life when it goes missing.

Until next time, may you have fun & amaze yourself~

Marsha