Whenever I start taking my writing life too seriously, whenever I start pressuring my stories and ideas to perform like products and widgets, tasks to complete, words to produce, things get complicated. I get stressed. I burn out. My creativity, my entire spirit dwindles to nothing and the whole writing thing becomes such a chore and misery that I wonder why I bother with it at all.
A few years ago, I devised a solution to this problem.
There’s a large ring binder on my desk. It’s light blue, and has a cover decorated with rainbow marker, scribbles and splashes of exuberant colour around the big words in bubble writing, Play Projects.
Inside are pages and pages of handwritten notes that free me from the drudgery of the word after word, writing to algorithm type of writing that many indie authors get caught up in (and I have too, too many times). These notes excite me, thrill me, inspire me, and keep my creativity burning bright.
These are my Play Projects.
I am a multi-passionate, multi-minded creative. Some call it a multipotentialite. We are the writers who don’t and can’t focus on one thing at a time, who have many diverse interests, and want to make All The Things.
I maintain a focus project, a book I keep working on in the majority of my writing time until its done. But when the Shiny Object Syndrome comes knocking at my door, I’ll show it to the Play Projects space.
On days when I’m not working on the focus project, or after I’ve finished with it for the day, I let myself explore Play Projects.
What Is A Play Project?
Sometimes I make notes on ideas, expanding what’s in my head onto paper. Sometimes I research and make notes on different topics that have snagged my attention. Sometimes I play at outlining stories that may or may not get written. Or I might explore plans of things I might do for the intention of writing about later.
There are no rules in the Play Projects, except that everything must be approached with the spirit of play and the purpose of creative fulfillment above all else.
When I finish a focus project and am unsure what will next fill that space, I turn to the Play Projects folder.
What excites me the most?
What has the most potential to become something vast and fulfilling?
What is the most developed?
What interests me the most?
This project then becomes my focus project, and I take those notes out of the binder and slot them into my focus project folder.
My novel Night Shift At The Shadow Bay Hotel was born this way. As was my website and associated books, Tarot Writers.
It can also work the opposite way.
I don’t always finish my focus projects. Or sometimes file them away for later completion. There are many reasons why I might quit, but the work is never lost or abandoned. It is relegated to the Play Projects folder and might one day return to the focus space.
How Might Play Projects Benefit You?
Try it and see.
Get yourself a folder and a stack of holed blank paper. Create a cover for your binder, as playful as you like.
If you’re more digitally minded this can also be done with a computer file folder (give it a custom icon to mark it as special).
And then take time to play.
Play with your ideas, play with different forms on how those ideas might become something more.
Forget productivity, forget algorithms and markets, and right and wrong and all the writing so called rules, and just see what comes out.
Get purely creative, express yourself. This is what the writing life is meant to be about.
