Cover image by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash.com
Beloved,
Immediately after publishing “Morning Pages and rediscovering writing“, I undiscovered it and stopped prompt journaling altogether.
It was almost like a cruel joke from the universe. Say you’re taking steps to go back to writing today, completely throw that out the window the next. I entered one of those familiar phases where I barely journaled at all and started once again forgetting how to write.
To be fair to myself, I don’t think it was about writing. It was, more than anything, about my old friend, depression.
It wasn’t aggressive this time. I didn’t feel especially miserable, but somehow, it still managed to strip away the things I enjoy. Walking. Reading. Writing. Not gone, but dimmed – dulled to an almost zero. So much so I didn’t look forward to them anymore. In fact, I dreaded them. Writing even a grocery list felt like such a chore, let alone a whole journal entry – or a book.
I think the idea of art kills creativity.
― Douglas Adams
Then one day, while reading a webtoon titled A Savage Proposal, because all I could stomach were goofy cute plotlines, I found myself giggling and kicking my feet. I found myself enjoying something and thinking – Why can’t I just write something like this.
That thought knocked the air out of me a little as soon as it hit. Because as a teenager, I had written stories like that. Long before I told myself I needed to write the next great literary novel. Before I started trying to craft stories that were supposed to say something profound about the human condition. Back when writing felt like the funnest thing in the world.
For over a decade now, I’ve told anyone who would listen that writing is torture. That I no longer enjoyed it and I only still thought about it (cause I definitely wasn’t doing it) because I believed writing was my true calling, even though I had started to believe that less and less. However, I never really sat down to interrogate why I had fallen out of just having fun with it. And the answer turned out to be very simple: I was writing stories I didn’t enjoy writing.
That’s it.
You’re not required to save the world with your creativity. Your art not only doesn’t have to be original, in other words, it also doesn’t have to be important.
― Elizabeth Gilbert
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ll still write those stories one day. I love them. I think they’re good. Some have even taken me places. But my God, do they sap my soul. They take a lot for me to write.
You know what doesn’t? Writing silly romances with plots thinner than my will to live. Stories that make me grin like an idiot and kick my feet in bed as if I’m not the one writing them and know what’s coming next.
I’ve now written 80,000 words of this ridiculous love story that does not reinvent the wheel in any shape or form. But it’s more than I’ve written in over a decade. Probably more words than I’ve written in my entire career as a fiction writer. And it was not even some Sisyphean feat. I wrote the entirety of it in give or take two months. And I had a mighty fun time doing it.
The last time I felt like this was probably when I secondary school, writing a story called The Prince, The Hunter and Me ( I kid you not) that made the girlies giggle. (I went to an all-girls school). They loved it so much, they stole it from my desk and I had to rewrite it from scratch. And even as I did so, I enjoyed the rewrite as well – though I also never finished that draft cause I somehow ended up losing it. All on my own this time. I pretty sure it’s somewhere in darkest corners on whether my mom’s house or my best friend’s house.
It can be stifling to your creativity to walk into the studio each day thinking you have to make something important. Have fun with your artwork; the world needs joy and lightness as much as it needs the important work.
― Artwork Archive
Anyway, I’ve taken pieces of that juvenile story and reworked them into something I know how to better handle now. And the whole process? It has been so joyous and seamless.
How wild is it that after years of telling people writing was no longer a hobby – because I didn’t enjoy it, because I kept trying and failing, because I’d quietly retired from the craft – I was absolutely wrong. There’s still pleasure here. It turns out, something can be your calling and be your hobby at the same time. You can write for fun and still take it seriously. You can enjoy it and still do it well.
Beloved, maybe I’ll finish this story and fall right back into another long silence. Maybe the dread will creep back in. Maybe I’ll open a new document and feel, once again, like I’m trying to bleed a masterpiece out of stone.
But for now? I’m having the best time.
And maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe it’s not about taking your passion so seriously that it becomes a burden. Maybe it’s this: Write the fun thing. Write the one that makes you grin like an idiot at 1 a.m. Write the line that makes you text your friends, “Wait, wait, listen to this – ” Write the story that is deeply unserious. That is indulgent, silly and soft. The non-award winning book of your dreams.
Just write it well.
I think if we go to bed thinking I hope I wake up tomorrow, we’d probably not live as long.
I love reading your work.