Dale Carnegie once said, “People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”
I love that. It’s a reminder to me that if I am dragging my heels about something that I need to reframe it. How can I make it a better experience?
Most of us are good at working hard. We all know how to work more. But I think it can be easy to lose sight of how to enjoy our work.
NaNoWriMo got like that about Week 3. I was struggling after 30k words. My plot had holes big enough to fly a spaceship through. I was staying up later and later, and other times waking early to get those words in. My kids were at the pool and I was typing away while slurping coffee. Was I having fun?
I was suffering emotional highs and lows from the writing. High because I had gotten so far. Low because I had so much further to go. Going back to read anything I had written previously (but reminding myself not to edit) was painful.
So before despairing too much more, I asked myself the following:
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Was I doing better today?
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Why was I doing this?
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How could I make it more fun?
By any objective measure, I was doing “better” than before because every day that I wrote, I was increasing my word count and working out my tiny writing muscles.
I had to remind myself that the reason I was giving up sleep and social life and reading for pleasure is because I wanted to recover a piece of my myself that I had suppressed for two decades.
The last part stumped me a bit. Then I followed the NaNoSprints on Twitter. And those were fun. Writing prompt – NINJA. Go!
Did matter there was not a ninja in my story? I just rolled with it. And it worked. I did find a way to incorporate it into a scene. Maybe I cut it later, but for now, writing it was fun. Another thing I started to do was look at movie stills to capture a mood or character look that I was aiming for. Looking at movie shots? Definitely enjoyable. Visually fun.
That was stimulating and refilled the creative well. So I would suggest to you, if your writing is starting to pain you, it’s time to look outside of your normal routine for inspiration to inject some fun into your writing.
“It’s a reminder to me that if I am dragging my heels about something that I need to reframe it.”
Yes, this! This is true for everything: writing, storytelling, life. It is a great benchmark to keep your outlook fresh and your problem solving skills creative.
Thanks for reminding me ;).
Thanks for reading. If you’ve read Steve Pressfield’s War of Art, then you know that it is a form of resistance that we have to work through.