Does It Need To Be Fun?

The original title of this post was “It Should Be Fun”. I was planning on talking about how writing needs to be enjoyable. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t quite what I believe.

It’s not that writing shouldn’t be fun. It’s that “fun” is too weak a word for what writing is. And writing is not always “fun” in the “it’s party time” sense. I don’t think it should be.

Writing should be a passion. The passion for telling a story is what drives you back to your computer or notepad day after day, even when you’ve hit a roadblock. Even when you just want to play video games.  The passion makes you despair at what you’ve written, and makes you strive to be better.  The passion is what hooks you and keeps you at it until you are pummeled into submission.

Writing should be intense. I don’t care what you’re writing, whether it be a children’s book, a romantic comedy, a thriller, or the next War and Peace, writing is an intense experience. Something about the act of creating a story will bring forward emotions and thoughts you might not wish to face. You are the god or goddess of your writing universe and that, my friends, is an intense and often wrenching experience.

Writing should be important. Writing should be taken seriously. What you write might not be serious, but the act of creation is serious. This is a gift that you are giving to yourself and to the other people who will read what you’ve written. It should have importance in your life because it is miraculous. If done correctly, other people will see what you see, hear what you hear, feel what you feel. Being a writer, creation of any kind, is an awesome privilege.

Writing should be gratifying. There is such gratification in watching something you’ve created come to life in your hands. There’s nothing like coming up on a roadblock in your story and finding your way around it. There’s absolutely nothing like looking back at your story and thinking “I wrote that. That world did not exist, but now it does. That story was not told, but now it is.”  When you write, you take things you’ve observed and heard and internalize them, then mold them into something else like a kid in a mud puddle.

And, finally….

Writing should be fun.