The Playful Process
The Artist's Way Week Nine: Recovering a Sense of Compassion
If The Artist Way were a musical, week nine is the reprise of week three’s All you need is (self) love!
“Fear is what blocks an artist,” Cameron writes. “The fear of not being good enough. The fear of not finishing. The fear of failure and of success. The fear of beginning at all. There is only one cure for fear. That cure is love.”
But this time, she adds a bridge: Love for an artist isn’t discipline but enthusiasm. And enthusiasm looks an awful lot like play.
I imagine that the mandate for play might not land well with memoirists wrestling with the most painful chapters of their lives, say, or historians trying to shed light on the horrors in human history. I’m a fiction writer who gravitates toward playful premises, but on the days I’m writing a troubling scene, play is the furthest thing from my mind.
But Cameron isn’t suggesting subjects should be playful—the best literature makes those in pain feel less alone by holding up a mirror, after all—but she is suggesting that our writing lives might be immeasurably improved if we can be playful with our process.
Morning people might choose to write in the pre-dawn hours because it tickles them to be productive while the rest of the world sleeps. Night owls might choose to work late into the night for the same reason.
I don’t remember reading about infusing the writing process with play when I worked through this program the first time—I was likely pretty focused on all the bits about self sabotage and fear. But the idea of a playful process must have wormed its way into my playful little brain because my writing process today is super-saturated with playfulness.
Why write with an ordinary pen when I can write with a Tinkerbell pen a friend brought me from Disneyworld?
Why write at my desk when I can curl up in the nest of pillows on the spare bed and scribble away?
Why keep my pen in a normal cup holder when I can use a pen stand that reminds me to stay present and smile?
Why edit in track changes when slashing words and adding margin notes on a printout makes me feel drunk with power and gives me two chances to think through the change—on the page and as I type it in.
By embracing writing as play, Cameron says, we’re inching toward writing session as playdate. If we wear the bathrobe we love or light the candle we think we should save or write nestled in pillows instead of rod straight in a chair, our writing becomes a place we itch to return to.
Lately, I’ve been turning my writing sessions into train rides.
I should pause to explain that I like trains.
Like, a lot.
Like, I regularly use credit card points to book out and back train trips so I can write and watch the world roll by.
Recently—like this very week, in fact—I found a YouTube video that made me giddy: “Train Sound for Sleep White Noise 10 Hours.”
Admittedly that title is neither catchy nor accurate. While the video does technically last ten hours, it’s ten hours of a 2.5 minute loop of towns and fields and fields and fields on repeat, but that bothers me not at all.
All this week I threw that video onto my laptop screen while I wrote on the giant second monitor where I enlarge my word document beyond all reasonable proportion so I can keep living the lie that I’m fine without reading glasses—fine! With my word program filling one screen and my train window video filling the other while a gentle clacka clacka clack plays in the background, I can recreate the experience of writing on a train—me type, type, typing while the world rolls by.
And, look, I get that not all writers are the colossal train nerds I am, but in this golden age of free YouTube content, you can find a window into any world you like. Before I stumbled across my trainvana video, I regularly booting up the fireplace video on Netflix, but that video is only one hour long and every time it ends I was dumped into my “continue watching” screen. Your mileage may vary, but I for one don’t need that kind of temptation in my life
That said, there is a whole world of these slow TV videos you could play in your “window” if you wanted to try it out. Maybe you’d rather float with some trippy blue jellyfish:
Or spend ten moonlit hours on a beach in Portugal:
Maybe you’d like a woodland scene?
Or maybe watching a river flow is more your jam?
And—in breaking news—I’ve just now discovered a twelve-hour YouTube video of a crackling fireplace that makes my inner artist do the Snoopy dance to end all Snoopy dances.
Twelve hours of crackle and pop, people! Twelve!
My next chapter is totally going to snap, crackle, and pop its way into existence!
What about you? How are you playful in your writing process?
I love this post. Learning about the fireplace video, alone, is a revelation. But I also love the other playful ideas you've offered up. As a career writer and editor who spends all day, every day doing just that (to help pay the bills, not finish a book), setting aside the time and getting motivated enough to work on said book is difficult.
Kinda like being married to a contractor and expecting the kitchen or bath to be remodeled after workday hours or even on weekends. It's not gonna happen.
Your ideas here make the prospect of writing creatively in those off-work hours much more appealing. And that said, I continue to be impressed with your habit of putting pen to paper first (and finger to laptop later). Makes settling into those soft pillows a little easier.
I love playing CDs in the background while I write, as well as sipping my favorite teas. After reading how you inject play into your writing sessions though, I may need to up my game. I used to love writing in coffee shops but decreased that frequency when my kids when to college. Stopped cold with the pandemic of course. Haven't been back yet.