The Power of Play
This week, my students have been writing me emails with all these great questions. I have asked them if I can respond here, on the blog.
Here are some of their questions (we’re all in writing-clas withdrawl, I think):
What do I read?
I’m lost without class, what do I do?
Should I do my project as a novel or a memoir?
My book is done—and I hate to say this but—I think it might be okay. I think it’s perhaps ready. What do I do now?
Why didn’t you tell me about Melissa Bank earlier?????? Why?
I used to love revision. Now, I’m not sure—when do I revise? Create new work?
This week, I’m looking at Paul’s question. Paul’s a terrific fiction writer and a brilliant teacher. He’s in graduate school in creative writing (starting in fall). He writes every day and he was my T.A. His wife is named Joy. Here’s part of an email he sent me, just after moving to grad school:
I did get my writing desk set up though. It’s a cool old desk. My candle is right beneath the fire alarm, which makes me nervous, but it is what it is. And I have been writing everyday, as always. It’s kinda cool, there are trees right by the window, so I hear the birds sing every day while I write.
I am having a hell of a time actually getting my stuff typed up. What is your schedule when you write? Do you wait until a story is finished before you type up the handwritten version, or do you do it as you go? My problem is that if I type it up everyday, I am afraid that it will be too present in my head and I will start to shape the story. But if I wait until the story is finished, it takes so long to transfer it to an electronic version that I get discouraged and would just rather keep writing by hand.
My answer in one word: Play.
Here’s my winding answer.
Every summer, I take a writing class. It’s how I grow as a teacher. The benefits I receive as a writer are gravy. I’m a student every summer because I am lost without school and because I learn how to improve my teaching by taking classes from master teachers.
My teachers have been: my yoga teacher, Lynda Barry, Robert Olen Butler, Janet Burroway, Abigail Thomas, Sharon Olds, and, most recently, Molly Peacock.
Here’s what I have noticed eight years into this summer-school program I’ve set for myself.
Everything I learn from these master teacher-writers comes back to the same basic concept: the power of play. What we do is play.
Every teacher quotes the same sources, the core texts of psychology of creativity and play theory. Every teacher says the same thing: tell the truth, lead with emotion but always in image, keep your oddness about you like you keep your savings, your cloak: it’s just like play. I go to the Calder symposium, hear the same thing. He loved his toy circus. He was seriously devoted to play.
Art is play. The answer to your question, Paul, is found in reading about play. Or playing about play. These are the books my teachers keep referring to, in every class! Same books! And they are the ones I go back to again and again.
Winnicot: Playing and Reality
Johan Huizinga: Homo Ludens
Barry: 100 Demons
Terr: Unchained Memories and Beyond Love and Work
Butler, Burroway: From where you dream
Paley: The boy who would be helicopter
Calder: An autobiography with pictures
This is the short course in the philosophy of play; forget all those handbooks about How To Write Your Novel Yesterday! And Plot for Dummies. Simply steer towards play. Notice play.
I didn’t used to know this is what I had to do in summer: be a student. I thought I was supposed to travel to artist residencies and sequester myself, writing wild. And I did do this, many times. Not for me. It was a giant “should.” I got nothing done writing wise at these residencies; there was lots of reading and napping and friend-making, which all was really wonderful in a kind of glorious mental patient way. But it wasn’t play. The residencies were for me leisure.
It wasn’t play. For me, staying home, writing–that’s play.
Paul, when you wonder what to do next, sit down with yourself. Light your sweet dangerous fire alarm candle. Get quiet. You’ll know. You will know what to do. (I know I sound like the laziest teacher ever, but truly—I’m not!) You’ll ask your unconscious: what’s the most fun, engaging, kind of wildly weird but grounded and wonderful thing I could do today?
IT will tell you. You’ll just know.
To ask “do I do x or do I do y” is to ask the wrong question. (It’s a head question. So it’s a good question, a smart and useful question but not for us.) It’s not a play question. Play is about creative questions. Creative questions are the process of making things. The question and the answer are one—you make the house of blocks (and it was sad that kid got bit!), people move in, lives bloom, you knock that house down,answer is always a new question.
What I am saying, very poorly is, to answer your question, build your process. You have to invent. You are inventing it.
So tomorrow when you go to your studio all clueless and grumpy and no internet and all these pages, if you get quiet, you’ll feel a kind of “edge”—it won’t make sense, exactly. The teacher part of us will say: huh? Follow the tug, let yourself be pulled. It doesn’t really matter if you type up or don’t type up, or get lost or make a mess. Later, at night, you can organize or sort yourself out. Or not.
When your candle is burning, fall backwards. Into play. Follow that. Yes?
If you read any of those books I’d love it if you wrote me and told me what you are learning. In a playful way!
Paul. It’s all about Joy. Joy gets it. Get it?
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