I’ve been teaching Fearless Writing classes for several years. In these workshops, I spend very little time talking about the craft and business of writing and publishing. Mostly, I talk about the emotional challenges of filling blank pages with stories meant for the eyes of complete strangers.
My students are almost always men and women in their mid-twenties and up. Most of their fears were accumulated, cultivated, and fortified by the treacherous road they have all traveled: responsible adulthood. They’ve had jobs, careers, marriages, and children. They’ve paid their bills, did laundry, and changed their oil. In short, they have taught themselves to survive, doing what they have to do whether they wanted to or not.
Yet, the discipline they’ve acquired to manage their daily lives eludes them, somehow, when trying to write. To be clear, they always want to write their stories. They all enjoy writing when they actually do it. Yet, they often feel overwhelmed by a nameless inertia when they sit down at their desk. Unlike all the chores their domestic or professional lives require, they simply cannot make themselves put pen to paper. They cannot make themselves find the right stories, scenes, or even words. So, they avoid it altogether or give up, feeling like utter failures.
There are a lot of reasons why people who like to write don’t: ruthless self-criticism, self-consciousness, rejection. I anticipated as much when I started teaching the workshops. However, I never imagined that the most fundamental obstacle all these writers shared centered around the popular notion that writing and fun, allegedly, go hand-in-hand.
By fun, I don’t mean New Year’s Eve party fun or dancing in your bedroom fun. Nor is it the going to a movie kind of fun. By fun I mean the effortlessness of laying your attention on something that is inherently interesting to you; the excitement of discovery, following an idea where it wants to go; the joy of losing track of time, sinking into the dream of the story you’re telling and forgetting about the world outside your window.
As a writer, if you’re not feeling excited and inspired, you’re either telling the wrong story or telling it right one the wrong way. Writing is always the search for the effortless path. Struggle and resistance come with the territory, as you traverse that path, however. Eventually, you’ll get there. You’ll know you have arrived by how good you feel. Nothing feels better – and I mean nothing – than when you have found your way and the story carries you away like a friendly current. It’s as good as life gets.
And this is, precisely, the problem so many of these adult writers have. Fun, enjoyment, and excitement had become things you might experience when all your work has been done. Typically, you’d set these things aside for the weekend or retirement. They had trained themselves not to complain about this, but to accept that life isn’t meant to be easy. Life tries us, our metal: all of which makes writing seem impossible.
I also think it makes authentic, lasting success impossible for anyone doing anything. Ernest Hemingway said, “If you’re not having fun, you might as well kill yourself.” He was right in his own grim way. I am not some mule that was born into this world to drag a plow around until my body breaks down. I don’t get up every morning to just survive, to merely not-die. Nor do I work to build a world in which I will one day be safe–some castle with a moat of 401K savings.
I do not live in the future but, forever, in this very moment, which is where all success can be found. The moment I accept fun–simply effortless engagement with life–as my guide rather than some reward that waits for me at the end of work, I propel myself closer to the life destiny wants me to lead. However, I cannot follow that guide unless I trust it, secure in the knowledge that more lies ahead, more than struggle, a grind, or a labor. That’s just a story adults tell one another to ease the pain of a life they needn’t be living. It’s one they began to tell when they decided fun existed only for kids and old people waiting to die.
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