Put the Joy Back On the Page

When I was a kid, I hated P.E. I was terrible at it, which didn’t help any. My parents didn’t care about it and I wasn’t on any teams away from home. When we picked sides for teams, I was always the last one picked. And the thing I hated most in the world was the mile run. We had to run it every year (just that once—no practicing allowed!) and that time was the only measure of our fitness the school every used.

When I was in high school, I did everything I could think of to avoid P.E. classes and it wasn’t until I was on a trip with a bunch of teens that something amazing happened. It had been raining this whole trip, and we were camping, but this one afternoon, there was this burst of sunshine and we all spontaneously decided to chase the adult chaperones in the group around and throw them into the river.

For the first time in my life, I enjoyed running. I had purpose, and no one was judging me, measuring me, comparing me. It was just me, my legs, and the soft sand. I remember that running better than any lousy game of dodgeball I played all through elementary school. It was glorious!

If you are a writer, please find moments when writing is like that for you. If NaNoWriMo makes you feel like writing is just about keeping score, don’t do it. If you’re working on a project you can’t seem to finish, considering working on a side project that brings joy back to your heart. I won’t say that writing done while bored or frustrated never works. It actually often works as well as anything else. But you—the person—won’t work as well.

You can run every day and get better and better at running, but you’ll give it up if you don’t find joy in the sensation of your body’s motion. Eventually, you will stop caring no matter how many outside factors are attached to you needing to care about your running or how much money you get paid to do it. The same is true of writing. You need joy in it. If it’s only the chocolate you’re eating while you type away, OK, that’s a decent first step. If it’s the sound of laughter when you make a writing partner read a great bit of dialog, even better.

As an adult, I started running a little bit in college, and then again in my 30s One of the things I discovered was that when other people weren’t pressuring me and I had the right gear and could do it at my own pace, I liked running again. Maybe you need to keep people away from your writing and measuring it. Maybe you need to find the right gear—a new computer program that helps you organize differently. Maybe you need a race (like NaNoWriMo) to get you smiling again.

Ask yourself, are you enjoying writing? And if not, then figure out how to change it so you do. Those sneakers are waiting for you to put them on again.