Do you remember your first writing attempts? What made you write? What was the attraction?
Chances are, it was fun. It was “pretend.” It was play.
When I was a precocious lad of twelve or so (it’s mostly worn off by now), a couple of my friends from church moved far away. They were both girls, but I wasn’t yet the Dreamy McDreamerson that I am now. I was both introverted and lonely, so I started writing letters to them, longhand at first, and then—get this—on a manual typewriter, which allowed me to use carbon paper (ask your grandma what that is) so I could write to both of them at the same time!
But these were not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, typical “How are you? I’m fine” kind of letters. Oh, no. Because writing can be fun. And I was having fun.
So, I would write a letter in the POV of “Cowboy Bob,” describing the events of my week in that character’s voice, as though I were a cowpoke on a dusty cattle drive, rather than a freckle-faced redheaded sixth grader in his Cincinnati bedroom.
I’d carry on that conceit for a few weeks, and then I’d start a new adventure as “Spaceman Bob,” before shifting a while later to, I dunno, “Radio Preacher Bob,” and so on.
We carried on that correspondence for a year or so, I suppose. Why? Because I had a typewriter and a piece of carbon paper. And because it was fun. And not just for me, it turns out. I learned years later that one of my friends found my letters so fun that she read each new missive aloud at the family dinner table, to the delight of her parents and older siblings.
I was mortified. Justifiably so, it turns out, because twenty-five years later a 9 x 12 envelope arrived in the mail. My other friend had saved all of those letters and sent me copies. I shouldn’t even have read them. It was humiliating because, believe it or not, I’d matured a tiny bit in those twenty-five years and my twelve-year-old self wasn’t nearly as clever as I had thought at the time.
But my point is—I was writing as play.
Bret Lott, in his book Before I Get Started, wrote,
It is the writing I enjoy, the actual act of sitting at my desk and looking out my window at the trees, the yard, the sky, and the intermittent sinking into the world of the story at hand, only to rise up and see that sky again, see those trees, see the angle of light through them different now for the sun passing over this all (Before I Get Started, p. 35).
Yes. See, we sometimes get so wrapped up in the pursuit of publication that we forget what attracted us to writing in the first place: It’s fun. Or it can be. It should be.
A writer is wise to hold on to that, to those moments when he’s laughed out loud, when she’s lost track of time, when you just had to call someone to listen to something you’d written just because it … was … so … much … fun.
Writing is its own reward.
Published or not.
Polished or not.
If it’s not, you’re doing it wrong.
