Are you having any fun?
Monday Musings
Here’s your mantra for the week! This week’s card is from my Cards for Creative Courage oracle deck. You can get it here or here.
When I went to the 20Booksto50K conference in Edinburgh in 2019, I was relatively new to independent publishing. Around that time, I ran into a lot of writers online who were mostly, if not only, in it for the money.
These were the writers – or, in some cases, wannabe writers, since not all of them had actually written anything yet – who left comments in Facebook groups for indie writers such as:
‘I don’t know much about this genre, and I don’t really like reading it, but I want to write in it because it sells well. What do I do?’ or ‘I hate romance novels, but my wife says it’s a billion-dollar industry, so tell me what I need to know about writing one.’
In principle, I have nothing against writing to market – I even wrote a guest post for fellow indie author Helena Halme about writing to market once – and I have absolutely zero against wanting your books to sell. But, I am very much not in favour of doing things your heart isn’t even a little bit in.
Purely wanting to write in a genre just because it sells well is one of those things, especially if it’s a genre you don’t particularly enjoy or can’t stand even.
I don’t know why I don’t run into these kinds of writers anymore – perhaps the mindset has shifted, or the algorithms figured out these weren’t my people – but, back in 2019, I scrolled past comments and questions like these every day.
So when I travelled to Edinburgh, I was a little bit scared of finding myself surrounded by people who didn’t write because they just had to write but because they hoped it’d prove a less awful way to generate income than their current jobs.
While there was talk of money, and I did meet some people who seemed more concerned with the money aspect than the creative aspect, the majority of people I ran into during the conference and afterwards were as passionate about writing as I am. What’s more, I’m still in touch with quite a of them.
It was such a relief to see for myself that the industry wasn’t just about the money – or, at least, not the 20Booksto50K crowd – and that so many writers were in this for the same reasons I am: because we love writing, have strong opinions about traditional publishing and its gatekeepers, and are a bunch of control freaks.
That said, I still felt some trepidation about the speakers of the conference. I knew that most of them would be talking about the money side of things, and I found myself hoping they wouldn’t reiterate again and again that it’s quantity over quality and that writing to market is the only way to go if you want to make it big.
It’s been five years, and I can’t quite remember who said exactly what – I’m sure there were a few who did say these things, and it were those talks I forgot about first – but I do remember that some speakers said stuff that resonated on such a deep level that it made me go ‘Fuck yes!’
My biggest ‘Fuck yes!’ happened during a panel that included Martha Carr. Martha said a lot of things that made me really happy, things that I will never forget, but the key moment for me was her talking about one of the questions she regularly asks herself:
‘Am I having any fun?’
Every time one of those (wannabe) writers I mentioned above posted something, that’s exactly what I wanted, but didn’t, ask: Are you still having fun? Are you enjoying yourself? Does this still bring you enough joy to actually pursue it?
The reason I never asked is because their posts made it abundantly clear these people were not in it for the fun. They were not in it for their own enjoyment.
Now, I’m not saying that everything needs to be fun. Not every part of the creative process is fun. There are ways we can make these parts more fun, but there will always be:
the things we love doing,
the things we’re OK with doing,
the things we’d rather not do, and
the things that are just bloody hard for us to do.
What’s important here is that we have fun somewhere on the journey, enough fun that it sustains us throughout the entire process.
For example, I struggle writing first drafts. I do love outlining, though, and the joy and excitement that part of the process brings me helps me get those first words on the page. If I’m lucky, it’ll sustain me through the whole first draft, after which comes another part I love: the editing phase.
If none of these phases brought me any joy, I would have stopped writing a long time ago. Even writing first drafts, though hard, have always been fun enough for me to keep going – I started writing long before I knew what an outline was and that plotting was both one of my superpowers and the key to me finishing first drafts.
If your creative practice has been lacking joy lately, or if you just want to sit with Martha’s question for a bit and be honest with yourself about whether or not you are having fun, I’ll be sharing one of the journaling prompts from 99 Writing Prompts and Journal Exercises for Writers to Cultivate Courage and Kick Imposter Syndrome to the Curb below. If you own a copy of the second volume of 52 Weeks of Writing, you’ll find the exercise at the end of Week 44.
Happy creating this week. May it allow you to have tons of fun with your creative work <3
xx Mariëlle
Am I having any fun?
This journaling prompt can be found in my 99 Writing Prompts and Journal Exercises for Writers to Cultivate Courage and Kick Imposter Syndrome to the Curb and the second volume of 52 Weeks of Writing.
The quote that accompanies it is – and I’m sure it goes without saying – is the one by Martha Carr I’ve repeated throughout this post.
Here’s the journaling prompt:
Look at your current work in progress and ask yourself:
Am I having any fun?
If yes, could you think of ways to add even more fun?
If no, what happened between the original spark and now? Was there even a spark to begin with?
Sit with the question for five minutes before you start writing.
This isn’t part of the original journaling prompt, but if you’re answer was ‘No’, I invite you to ask yourself which part isn’t any fun right now and think about ways you could make it a bit more fun.
Whether that’s enough fun for you to keep going forward with this project is up to you.
Ready to unleash the full force of your creative potential?
Step into Your Power: A 31-Day Tarot Challenge to Unleash Your Creative Potential is designed to help you do just that.
This tarot challenge invites you to sit with the question of power to unravel: where you’ve been giving your power away; why you haven’t stepped into your own creative power (yet); and how you can harness or reclaim that power without becoming overpowering yourself.
Get yours here.
This is so, so important. We've been conditioned to believe that achieving that all-important income goal is more important than our own happiness. Sure, we all have bills to pay, and life isn't always about doing things we find fun. But that doesn't mean we need to be miserable the entire time, even though that's pretty much what the Calvinist undercurrent of modern western culture says. I love how you put it: There needs to be enough happiness to balance out the parts that are more laborious, closer to drudgery. That's a very wise way to go about it.