Write playfully
Playfulness is the prep that brings freshness and spontaneity to your writing. It energizes your imagination, your writing, and most especially you. Playing when you write trains your body and your mind to weave unexpected words and ideas together across the wide range of your imagination rather than going down the same old fence-lined track. Playfulness teaches you to celebrate your originality, however bizarre it turns out to be.
Know that playfulness quickly gets easier as you work with Imaginative Storm prompts. The trick is to separate your attachment to the result from your commitment to the process. You can be serious about wanting to strengthen your writing chops, while knowing that being playful is the way to do it.
When you play, you’re not attached to a result. You’re not judging. You’re enjoying the flow of the activity without worrying about whether you’re doing it right. You don’t have to be wild and crazy or ha-ha funny—though you might. You’ll know you’re playing if you feel a smile creeping across your face as you write.
When you stretch your imagination by urging it to push further, it’s like stretching a muscle. Blood flows in, its range of movement grows, it gets stronger. Now it wants to do more! It’s antsy for more challenges. How silly or extreme can you get? How far you can take an idea or a metaphor?
Playfulness creates opportunities for fabulous mistakes. It gives you the confidence to include the weird things—the idiosyncrasies and quirks that bring your writing alive and give it your signature. You know those moments when you read another writer’s work and say to yourself, “How did they think of that?!” Guess what: they probably didn’t “think of it.” It wasn’t the result of willful effort. It just came to them because they’d trained their rational mind to welcome the gifts of their imagination.
This is what leads some of our participants to conclude that after Imaginative Storm, writer’s block is a myth. It’s a myth that might serve you short-term: if you want to think of yourself as a writer and you’re not writing, then you must be suffering from writer’s block. Only writers get writer’s block, by definition! That feeds into another myth: that writers should be racked with struggle and angst if they’re “real writers.”
Myths aren’t lies. They have truth to them—just not literal truth. It’s true that there are days when nothing comes and “writer’s block” feels like an ogre blocking your path. It’s true that completing a writing project can be hard, and that every time you start a new one, you don’t know if you can pull it off. The labor and the doubt and the apathetic days are real. What’s not real is that you are powerless to do anything about them.
Write playfully! Delighting in words makes you want to play more with them. Experimenting with words expands your range. Enjoying your writing makes the labor pleasant. Surprising yourself with what you write makes the doubt at least temporarily irrelevant. And widening the path by giving your imagination more possibilities to explore makes the ogre of “writer’s block” shrink to the size of a gerbil.
—from Imaginative Storm Writer Training by Allegra Huston and James Navé
