Private Writing as Playroom
This week’s article is an excerpt from Rebecca McClanahan’s instructional book Write Your Heart Out: Exploring & Expressing What Matters To You, published by Walking Stick Press. This season, as we watch children in an environment where everything seems transformed, we re-experience the magic of childhood. Rebecca McClanahan’s thoughts and advice help us retrieve the playful, wondering part of ourselves and bring it to our writing.
The world outside our door is not only rough; it can also be deadly serious. Grownups are expected to act in a grownup fashion. We are supposed to pay our bills, mow our lawns, go to our jobs, keep our checkbooks balanced. Even writing, which might have begun as a delightful leisure activity, a playful way to pass the hours, can become burdened with grownup expectations. Without intending to, we carry our nose-to-the-grindstone notions into our writing rooms. We tell ourselves we must write about important issues and not waste our time in frivolity. Our journals must be tools for self-improvement; they must teach us something. No more doodling in the margins, no more Saturday afternoons making up poems about three-toed tree toads.
When I lose the simple joy of writing for writing’s sake, which happens more often than I care to admit, it’s usually because I’ve been viewing my writing as a task that must be accomplished. It’s easy to see how this can happen when one is writing on assignment or under a publisher’s deadline. But journal writing? How in the world did that become a chore?
When this happens, I force myself to take three giant steps backwards to survey the situation. Private writing, I remind myself, is for my eyes only. No one is looking over my shoulder. There’s no one to please. So why the pursed lips, the furrowed brow? If there is no joy in Mudville, why keep going back to the batting plate?
Thinking of writing as child’s play is the best way I know to find my way happily back to the page. Kids aren’t afraid to be silly, so when I want to play in my journal I start by recording all the silly thoughts and goofy ideas that occur to me: “The man’s wife was so loose he even caught her in bed with the flu.” “Embroidery is crewel and unusual punishment.” “Nature isn’t the only mother who abhors a vacuum.” Sometimes I draw cartoons. In one, a nursing baby is singing, “Thanks for the mammaries.” In another, a man is wearing not a checkered past but a plaid one.
I know, I know. They’re not that funny. I should definitely keep my day job. But such silliness keeps me amused, and there are times when amusement is what I need from my writing. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll write a story about a character who goes around saying goofy things. Stranger things have happened. One of my cartoons–of a dime walking disdainfully past a penny lying in the gutter–evolved into a poem about the invention of zero. You just never know.
Besides silliness, another trait most children share is delight in the sounds and rhythms of musical words and phrases, even when those words carry little or no meaning. “Say it again,” my nephew begs. So I bring Lewis Carroll’s poem out of mothballs yet once more: “ `Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wake.” Then, primed for fun, I return to the writing desk and begin making lists of wonderful sounding words, the kind of words that, as one of my young students described it, “feel good to my ears”: blub, lurk, aubergine, Nefertiti. Many writers keep word lists, or play with word combinations as they write. “I found these words and put them together by their appetites and respect for each other,” wrote poet William Stafford. And Roy Blount Jr’s published journals contain fascinating sets of word pairs: lacy pants/participants; baseline/Vaseline, wrapper/reappear.
I start playing with the word lists, searching family likenesses: confetti, graffiti, cherry tree. If I keep playing long enough, the skeleton of a poem might emerge:
From the cherry tree,
blossoms scatter
like confetti
onto the curb,
against the graffiti.
Sometimes I uncover words hidden within other words. I recently discovered “marriage” tucked inside “miscarriage”– an odd discovery that started me thinking first comes love, then comes marriage, then carriage, miscarriage, miscarriage of justice, justice of the peace. This form of play is like a game of leap frog; the mind hops from one image to another, one idea to another. Even if the game leads nowhere (there’s that serious adult butting in again, suggesting that games are supposed to lead somewhere, produce something!), we’ve given our minds some healthy exercise and had a little fun along the way.
Thinking of writing as a playroom rather than as a workroom is one of many ways to discover milfs near me or rediscover the joy of private writing. A playroom has no boundaries. Now it’s a submarine taking you under. Now it’s a forest, dark and unexplored, where exotic creatures lurk. Now it’s a trunk filled with dress-up clothes. Now it’s the door to an unwritten story for which you have the only key, and, wonder of wonders, the key fits.