Monday, September 21, 2009

All Work and No Play. . .

Michelle posted this comment to my Wordle post: "Can something helpful be this much fun?" What a great question!

Does writing mean only suffering, sweat, insomnia? Can it also mean silliness, play, joy and, dare I say it, fun?

What do you do to have fun with your writing? I'm dying to know. Aside from Wordling, fun for me includes research (I know, I know; I'm weird. But there's something about poking around in the past that exhilarates me), reading old word origin books to help me hone simile and metaphor and filling my manuscript in with yellow highlighted empty spaces to be filled in later.

I shared. Now it's your turn.

4 comments:

  1. Baby name books are great fun. Also looking at the Social Security Administration's popular name lists, which go back to 1870. Many a character in my WIP has been named from the top ten list of their birth year:)

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  2. Fun is writing notes in my fancy notebook -- notes with ideas and snips of speech. They're just little bits and have no pressure on them to actually make sense in a book, so they are just plain fun.

    Also? Fiddling with my mechanical pencil. Putting drafts in pretty file folders. Clipping things with binder clips. I have a thing for office supplies.

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  3. I love walking around and, gradually, as my mind calms, suddenly realizing the answer to my writing problem. That blissful, Aha! moment.

    And, I actually love rewriting--finding that perfect word, that better metaphor, cutting, trimming, perfecting the pace.

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  4. I'm with you on the research - it's just like searching for clues in a mystery! I also enjoy thumbing through a good, old thesaurus, and before I had kids, could spend hours reading the phone book (and though my husband might say that as a metaphor, I mean, actually. reading. the phone book.) Golly I'm hip.

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