Episode 9: Permission to Play

Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. And I’m recording on July 21st, 2020. And this is episode nine of the Write Away podcast. So what has happened in my week, I wrote the opening chapter to a new romance. It’s a co-write. It’s in the same world that my co-writer and I have been writing in for almost two years.

And I worked on utilizing some of the things that I’d been learning in the first half of the month. One is Depth, which is a class that Dean Wesley Smith runs through his WMG publishing teachable, and I’ll put a link in the show notes. And the other is utilizing scene and sequel style plotting scenes.

This comes from a book called Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain and the scene sequel element is the most immediately applicable idea for most writers that comes from that book. It basically is two types of scenes: action and reaction. And it pairs really well with the three-story method idea of scenes with three points of things that happen.

I will put a link in the show notes of a really quick intro to a post about scene and sequel and also the full book. I discovered scene and sequel years ago in some writing advice by Jim Butcher on his website. I completely forgot about it, and then when I was in my learning mode a couple of weeks ago, I looked it up and discovered that it originated from this book.

And the book is so dense, not like hard to read, so full of practical information. I reached a point where I was like, okay, wow. I’ve learned so much, the book must be close to finished. And so I checked on my Kindle, like no, you’re 30% of the way through. Oh my goodness, there’s more good stuff to learn, so I closed it and set it aside.

So I’m like, all right, I’m going to go put what I have learned into practice before I dig deeper. That pattern tends to work really well for me. Learn until I feel a little overwhelmed, put it into practice for awhile, get a really good grip on it and then go back and learn more. So why am I talking so much about this book?

Well, this week’s topic is Permission to Play and I promise it’s going to tie in. This weekend a friend shared with me that they were reading a book that is very highly regarded in a lot of writing circles and they told me the name of the book and I made a face. I’m going to tell you what the book is, and this is not me shitting on the book.

It just doesn’t work for me. And the book is the War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Clearly it works for a lot of people. It’s no nonsense, tough Marine style, pull yourself up by your bootstraps advice. But that’s not advice that is terribly helpful for me. I’m really good at pulling myself up by my bootstraps.

I will pull myself up by my bootstraps until I pull myself into a mental breakdown. But like I said, it clearly works for a lot of people. It is a very useful way for many people to get their butts in gear and get over their resistance, which is one of Pressfield’s big ideas is overcoming resistance and it definitely would’ve been helpful at certain periods in my life, but it’s not something that is helpful for me now, in fact, it’s a quite dangerous mindset for me, where I’m at in my life.

And so what I’m about to talk about is not going to be helpful for other kinds of people. No advice is helpful for everyone. What I’m about to say is probably going to be more helpful for chronic overfunctioners, workaholics, and people who find themselves going from burnout to burnout. And I’m going to call out the cult of productivity right now.

Super prevalent in America. I’m sure it’s super prevalent in other places, but that’s where I have my experience, but you’ll see people who worship at the cult of productivity. Whether they know they do or not saying things like,  “I only slept four hours last night,” or “I worked 12 hours yesterday,” or “80 hours this week.”

And they’ll have this like long suffering face, but there’s a badly concealed era of pride that they’re working so hard. I was definitely one of those people once upon a time. And I don’t have patience for that bullshit anymore. That’s not healthy or necessary. And I could rant for a good half hour on that alone, but I’m not going to. So here is what I want to say to us, burned out overfunctioning workaholics.

I am giving you permission to play. I’m giving myself permission to play. On one level that can mean stepping away from work both physically and mentally and relearning how to relax. I can definitely tell you I’ve been through that, but I don’t know how many times I’ve been through the process of relearning how to relax.

Times when I finished up a big project and I don’t have anything on deck. And so I’m like, yeah, yeah, I’m going to take time off. I’m going take a weekend. I’m going to take a week and I’m not going to do anything. And then I sit around twiddling my thumbs going, what do people do when they’re not working?

So that’s a problem I have had multiple times. I have gone through a process of relearning how to relax this year again. And I feel like I’m doing okay right now. I have my gardening and I have my kid and I watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine during dinnertime with my housemates. And I feel like I’m in a good state of recovery at the moment in that realm of play.

But what I’m really interested in right now is bringing play into my work. Between life rolling me from one set of chaos to another, and my growing discontent with romance, writing had become a slog, but the romance, the writing of romance is the thing that puts a roof over my head and food on the table.

So I had to do it. I still have to do it, but the more I disliked it, the longer it took me to write. That meant more time doing a thing I was already starting to hate, which meant I worked even less efficiently. We needed more time. It was a vicious cycle and I’ve been doing better these last few months, as other areas of my life have calmed down, but I still didn’t like writing this.

I was resentful of it. I wanted to get away from it, but at the same time, I didn’t want to make my other writing need to stand on its own two feet yet. I just want to enjoy my writing of scifi fantasy. I don’t want it to have to make money yet, because once I count on something to make money, it becomes a thing I have to do.

And this is one of those playful things. I want to keep it play for a while, but I think I can bring the play into the romance writing as well. And this is brand new discovery as of this week. So I wrote that first chapter this week. It took me a couple of days because I had gone two, maybe close to three weeks without writing.

And I sat down and I wrote this chapter and found it joyful. So what was different? I’ve mentioned a few times that I basically took the first two weeks of this month off from writing, not off from work. I took it off from productivity. I wasn’t producing, but I read and I learned, and learning is play for me.

I have full intentions of going back to university some day. Just for fun. I want to get a history degree. I think I might’ve mentioned that in my goals episode. So I learned: The Techniques of the Selling Writer, the Depth class, the W Plot, just kind of packing all these things into my brain and loving it.

And when I sat down to write this opening scene for this brand new book, I applied what I had learned, and I played with it. The writing was way slower than my average, and that’s without even counting the pre-writing. So if we count that, then it’s crazy slow for me. But it wasn’t painful. It was so joyful.

I felt so much pressure just to get things done. I’ve left my kind of play out of my process because my process was getting shit done, until it wasn’t. I’ve wanted to slow down in my work for awhile. Previously, I thought that meant less time working, more time doing other things. And I’m still interested in that. I’d love to have enough income or income streams that mean I only have to work half the year, whatever. But I realized that maybe slowing down is just that I write slower and enjoy it more. And now, instead of being in a vicious cycle of slowing down, I hope to be in a positive cycle. I hate to put an expectation that I will get faster at writing, though I suspect that that will be a positive outcome.

I don’t want to put that expectation on it, but I do want the work to become continually more fun. I want to build that level of fun into my work, because this is literally the best job in the world for me. I am so grateful, even on the days where I have hated what I was writing.

I am so grateful to be doing the job. I am doing the job I dreamed of since I was a kid and I don’t want to make it a thing I hate. So I’m giving myself permission to be slow, I’m giving myself permission to be patient, and I’m giving myself permission to play. My question for you this week is do you have trouble giving yourself permission to play? And what does play look like in your life? You can leave your comment at www.writeawaypodcast.com