Writing for Fun

Speaking of writing advice that I’ve found on line – and this is old advice that I’ve given and been given a thousand times, but that has been lost to me for quite a while – writing should be fun.

I know I admire the living hell out of Flaubert’s struggling on his chaise lounge for days at a time, wrestling with a single sentence. I envy his migraines as he scratched out and replaced a single word a dozen times with synonyms and antonyms and, I don’t know, hieroglyphs I imagine.

I have sustained for months at a time with tuna fish and coffee, and thought myself more the artist for it, and maybe I was, but my writing has always been its best when I have enjoyed it. When I’ve surprised myself, taken on something new, or taken on something old in a new way. When I’ve learned from what I’m doing.

So last week, I rewrote a book called What I Know About Boys by Louis Redmond, published in 1952. Each page of text was mirrored by a black-and-white picture of a boy or some boys. Sometimes I rewrote the entire passage. Sometimes I changed a particular phrase. Sometimes I changed just a word. Sometimes I was sarcastic, sometimes parodic, sometimes sentimental, sometimes sincere – and every combination of those things.

I had in mind, initially, that the copyright of the book must, by now, be expired, and I would be able to reprint the book in my own fine way, but, apparently I don’t understand copyright laws, and it might be another half century before this gem hits bookshelves (e-bookshelves or the other kind).

But, still and seriously, that’s not the point. I enjoyed the writing – in process and product.

E-Community

There is some really good writerly advice out there in the electronic world, and I credit said world for part of my recovery as a writer. I have been looking through blogs of all sorts – there are thousands about the act, the art, and / or the craft of writing – many of which offer sweeping encouragements or banal platitudes; others offer writing exercises and experiments; some describe publishing processes or guides to landing an agent: I have found them all very helpful, each for their own specific reasons.

I suppose this blog is the closest I can come to thanking the world for continuing encouragement.

It is also nice to know that there are many many readers out there in the world: literary and genre, pulp and electronic, those who read for pleasure and those who read more like a form of worship – and, the best news of all, many folks who read in many or all or more ways than I listed.

Writing, as I tell every student in every writing class, is a community activity – even the most sacred, secret journal (in that it offers an outlet for feelings or perhaps a source of joy or solace) is a social act, because it affects the way in which we deal with the world.

Writing is a community activity and I am thankful to the internet for providing a limitless community of writers. (I do not mean “limitless” hyperbolicly – I simply do not believe an I could exhaust the online writing community.)