Writing For Fun; or "Oh, so that's what it looks like inside your head…"

Fair Warning: This is almost verbatim text scraped from my writing journal’s entry for yesterday. “Almost” because I did fix the worst typos and expanded book titles from my journaling shorthand.
 
What would it mean to “write for fun”? Have I ever done it? To me, it seems I’ve always taken writing so seriously. Especially the last few years, as I’ve tried to sell what I write.
 
Of course, that begs the question: Did I ever program for fun? Yes. I did. At one point. But even that became more serious. I programmed toward a specific goal: I wanted to make games. Which later morphed into programming to complete software products like The Journal. These days, most of the “programming for fun” happens when fixing bugs or adding interesting new features to The Journal (or some product that already exists). The completed product provides a sandbox for “fun”. Sorta.
 
I’ve had fun writing some stories. Novels, though, always seem like work. I guess because of the amount of dedicated effort required.
 
Door Sky (The Door to the Sky) might be the most fun I’ve had writing a novel. It was short. I was doing odd/cool stuff in every chapter/story. Or at least I thought so.
 
Gunwitch (Gunwitch: A Tale of the King’s Coven) was fun to write in parts. The big ballroom battle in Gunwitch2 (Gunwitch: The Witch Hunts) was a lot of fun to choreograph and write. I’m looking forward to the battles in Gunwitch3.
 
I’m not sure Horse Girl (The Girl Who Ran With Horses) was especially “fun” to write. Except for the POV “voice”. I kind of enjoyed writing in the mental voice of a 13-year-old girl.
 
I *thought* TSF (The Summoning Fire) would be fun to write, and it started out that way. Mostly. But it became a grind to finish it, even as I wrote stuff that was “fun”. Just wasn’t a lot of fun to write the whole thing.
 
The GOSH books (New Fairy Moon and Living Ghost Time) have had some fun parts, but also some rather challenging parts.
 
Maybe “fun” just doesn’t have a lot to do with it.
 
But, really, what would it mean to pick up a writing project in any spare time and just work on it? Didn’t I used to do that? Like in high school? Sure, there were plenty of times I would spin my wheels, but I also got known for going upstairs and pecking away at the typewriter. Most of that, though, was always on the same project. Or retooling/reshaping a similar project over and over.
 
When I would try to plan during church services (of which there were many, many in my youth) or similar unengaging things, though, I would tend to prefer doing nothing. I don’t recall any “breakthroughs” while at church. Same for when I would try to think about a programming issue while at church. Without the ability to see the original code or run the debugger, there wasn’t much I could do.
 
Writing isn’t fun when all you can think about is how no one is ever going to enjoy this thing you’re working on. Or pay you for it. Everything comes with such a burden of future rejection. And it’s not even *real* rejection. It’s *imagined*.
 
Everything requires so much work. Solo work. There is nothing social about doing the work to get stuff done.
 
A big part of what slowed down Horse Girl was my despair of ever getting published. That and a lot of self doubt. The “ever getting published” bit has been replaced with “ever selling enough to pay back production costs/make a living”. Self doubt still lingers.
 
So … did I learn anything about “writing for fun”?
 
Truth is … as I just said to my brother on the phone … when you spend 3 months working on something, you want it to be a masterpiece. And that doesn’t really change if you compress the time from 3 months down to 2 month, or 6 weeks. It’s still a *lot* of work you’ve put in. It’s harder to “dare to be bad” when you have that much investment on the line.
 
Except … well … at least, when it’s over, you have something to show for the time. You don’t actually *lose* anything. The time was going to pass anyway. This way you have a tangible proof of effort.
 
Is that “writing for fun”? You put in a bit of time every day, just a small investment, and when you’re done you have this new thing that you’ve created. And it must have been fun. You kept at it. Either for the end result or for the work itself.
 
I don’t know that I want every novel to be a masterpiece … but I do want them to sell enough to justify the time spent.
 
Which is the self-defeating part. Because I have little to no control over how many copies will sell.
 
It’s almost like I need to totally take off my “publisher hat” when I’m writing. As a publisher, I *need* to think about how to sell what I have available. As a writer, though, I need to *not* think about the selling. The value of the work is the work itself. Not how many copies it may or may not sell. And when I think of the books I’ve written, I can’t let their sales (or lack of sales) impact what I think of those books. I’m pretty good about that part. I still like my books. I like my stories. Even the ones that have only sold a handful of copies.
 
When I’m writing, I need to not be a publisher. No thinking like a publisher while I’m writing. No commercial considerations. No worries about what will or won’t sell.
 
I’m OK with a slow build in my oeuvre. 1 to 2 novels per year builds up over time. Especially since I publish them as I go.
 
I’m a programmer still because that pays the bills. I’m a writer because I enjoy it. And it may someday pay the bills.
 
Stop carrying around weight you don’t need to. Or that doesn’t even exist.
 
How something will or won’t sell isn’t an issue to dwell on while writing.
 
How well something you’ve already written is or isn’t selling isn’t something to dwell on when writing.
 
When writing, write.
 
Seems so simple, doesn’t it?
 
-David
 
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