Craft Writing - The Importance of Play

06 Feb, 2025

I know a lot of people who ache, agonize, and antagonize their craft to produce work that's meaningful and good. This is fine. The act of writing is hard, (hard, however, does not mean it isn't Fun) and not every work will spring fully formed out of your brain case like that one thing you wrote when you were 15 that your English teacher complimented you on. This is normal. Good writing takes hard work.

That being said, there needs to be a space in your craft for play. For those of us who aren't employed by our craft, we're doing this for fun. Not everyone can stomach spending 4 hours revising and editing a work that is full of little mistakes and errors.

Instead, if you're feeling burnt out on your craft, try to change the way you engage with it. Write smut, poetry, prose, change your medium, experiment with new stationery, generally try something new and approach your hobby in a different way. Beyond my published adventure stuff, I write teeny tiny prose pieces and put them on Instagram, the occasional poetry in the margins of my notebook or my notes app on my phone, and generally try to blogpost here about once a week (although I've been slacking on that a bit lately, haha).

The important part about doing this is that it isn't done with the expectation of it "being good". The pressure of performance can suck away the joy of play. How many 4 year olds do you know who have fun playing Tag because they're the best player on the playground? None! They're playing for the joy of doing it, and hobbies ought to be done in similar ways.

You'll notice, as I have since I've been making a more conscious effort to play with my work, that the things you play or mess around with in your free time invariably work their way back into the stuff that matters. This is good, this is what it's like to learn!

I've noticed that visual artists tend to play with their craft almost instinctively. Artists on Twitter will threaten to "draw you pregnant" or make goofy little one-off comics about a particular funny story or something. Artist friends of mine doodle on their papers throughout the day. The visual artist toys with their craft and I see little reason that writers shouldn't also be doing this.

So here, in the spirit of play, give me 1000 words inspired by this image¹: