on writing "for fun"

GIF by Ari Bennett

When I was a kid I wrote a lot. I wrote with pencil in spiral-bound notebooks or when nothing else was available, loose printer paper.

I made up stories that were so far from my reality as a little Black girl who wore a uniform everyday and attended a Lutheran elementary school in Southern California. Most of the characters in my stories were white. They usually had magical powers and lived in kingdoms that I created simply with my mind.

Writing was like playing for me. It was something fun to do after school, when all my homework was done. I’d spend hours in class or in the car on the way home from school, weaving a story together in my brain. Mumbling dialogue under my breath. Itching for the quiet of my hot pink bedroom, where I could scribble it all out onto a blank page. For fun.

Now I’m 25. I live in New York and work in Marketing at a tech company. When people ask me what I do for fun, I tell them that I write. Which sometimes feels dishonest, mostly because of the “for fun” part.

Somewhere between elementary school me and 25-year-old me, I stopped writing stories and started writing mostly write about myself. Writing became a practice in putting words to my feelings and experiences, rather than a practice in creating a world with my mind.

Writing personal narrative is sometimes beautiful and sometimes exhausting. It’s a big part of what I do with this newsletter, and what I did with the zine that I self-published last year. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it might mean for me to try writing simply for fun again. To craft a story outside of myself, not for the purpose of anyone reading it, but simply for my own enjoyment.

In an article called “How To Write A Lot” by one of my favorite astrologers, Alice Sparkly Kat, they hypothesize that they write around 10,000 words a day, only 10% of which actually gets shared on the Internet:

“I write a lot. I write a lot more than you see here on this website. The stuff on this website is the writing that I do under what Jungians might call a persona or what astrologers might call midheaven related activities. I also journal. I have a shelf of old journals in storage. However, the bulk of my writing is still fanfiction.

I have fanfictions that I share on AO3. I have fanfictions, some spanning more than 15 chapters, in the notes app in my phone. I’ll never share some of these. Some of them don’t have story. It doesn’t matter how long they are—they don’t have any story in them. They have premises, characters and environments that are overly detailed because that’s where my attention was caught, but they don’t have story. They have obsessions and they have recurring emotional tropes that I use to comfort myself. They’re premises that I am not ready to end.”

Recently I tried to start writing a story again. I bought a spiral-book notebook at Walgreens, and just let my mind create something. I found that writing by hand could generate ideas I didn’t even know I had. I was surprised by the character details and narrative layers that ended up on the page. My hand hurt from trying to write as quickly as my brain was churning out words. Alice Sparkly talks about this in their article as well:

“Writing is attention that you give to yourself. It physiologically slows down your sense of time and thinking. There are thoughts that don’t surprise you until you stumble upon them in writing and then you sit there, charmed by your own genius.”

If I had to imagine what the inside of my brain looked like during this exercise, it would be very similar to Jimmy Neutron’s “brain blast” or the scene in Spider-Man: No Way Home where Peter Parker and Dr. Strange battle it out in the mirror dimension. My brain, which I’d considered dormant, fried by TikTok and Twitter discourse, was still a vessel for new ideas. Good ones at that.

And that’s what makes it tricky. My best thoughts come to me when I’m just writing for fun, when I’m not thinking about what other people will think when they read it. And yet, it’s difficult to combat the urge to capitalize off of these good ideas. To turn the story into a novel, or share it with a friend so they can tell me how good it is.

Once the prospect of someone else reading it enters my mind though, the practice of writing it feels different. I can feel the potential reader over my shoulder. My hand is slower. I start to question if what I’ve written is actually good.

I’m still figuring out how to write for fun when I’ve been conditioned to want to get paid to do what I love. When a really big part of me actually just wants to get paid to do what I love. What do I keep for myself? How do I eliminate shame from my writing practice, and allow myself to have fun? Is it so bad that I want to write a novel someday? How can I preserve myself?

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Some Things I Read This Week…

• This NYT article about how different people are dealing with Daylights Savings.

  “Dig out the stew and bread recipes,” wrote Alice Brown of Shelburne, Vt. “Get a good star chart and relearn all those major constellations,” she added. “Follow the phases of the moon; you’ll be seeing it a LOT over the next six months.”

  Donna Meehan of Melbourne, Fla., keeps a bottle of Coppertone suntan oil in her bag and takes a big sniff every time she needs a dose of summer. Aromatherapy!

  The end of daylight saving time isn’t the most pressing problem, of course. It’s a tradition to grouse about it if you hate it, gloat about it if you love it, an annual event that, like many things, soon shall pass.

• This Substack article on writing like it matters by Holly Whitaker.

  “I think we ask people things like I am being asked because we want to know the formula, the juice, how to replicate or establish or build. We are conditioned to believe that it doesn’t matter unless there are clicks, impressions, likes, comments, engagement; that our work doesn’t matter unless we’re known. I’ve been successful in the measurable ways because I followed those playbooks, but that has always left me miserable. Here, I have not followed the playbooks, I have done a lot of it wrong, but I have written like it matters, like what I have to say matters. If there’s any advice I have to give, it’s that.”

• This tweet:

  iya ehime ora @ehimeora

  If you’re a writer, your best work should not be on these platforms. It should be in your drafts, in your proposals, in your books and journals. Where it’s safe, protected, and experienced intentionally. Your words are a healing elixir, it should be treated as such.

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