Last night I decided to write for pleasure. My pleasure.
Sadly, a lot of writing time can be consumed with the less desirable parts of the trade: marketing, editing, blurb-writing, social media, writing-to-get-the-blasted-thing-done.
We’ve all been there. But when’s the last time you wrote for pleasure, not for purpose.
Much of what I have written this year has been purpose-driven, and, of course, that’s not bad. It’s good actually. Get a plan, stick to it, work hard, reach your goal. That’s been my driving force for years. Luckily, most of the time it has coincided with pleasure, simply because I love to write.
But there is something to be said for deadline-free, purpose-free, just-have-fun kind of writing.
That’s what I’m doing now. I’m writing a dramatic duet. Just because I want to. How selfishly creative of me. For me, pleasure writing using comes back to writing drama. It’s just so fun to watch the characters begin to form and to have new ideas pop into my head which lead to more ideas. I can get consumed by the narrative and forget about the outer-trappings of the world. To be transported as a writer! How delightful, indeed.
If you haven’t written for pleasure in a while, take a day off from your novel. Refresh your creativity on something that grabs your mind. Allow yourself to “go down the rabbit hole” and forget about the deadlines and the unfinished work ahead of you.
Enjoy the words. Laugh at the characters. Be silly with your expectations. Remember when you had yet to publish anything? When you would sit for hours all alone and laugh at the ridiculous things you’d written. You didn’t care what others thought or whether you should query an agent. You wrote for the love of it. You wrote for pleasure.
I must admit–it’s quite fun to be doing that again.
