I just wanna have fun
on unlearning seriousness
From a young age, I hated writing. Creative writing exercises in school stressed me out, school papers felt unnecessarily difficult. I remember how frustration would build in my chest, welling up into angry tears when I couldn’t figure out what to write next, knowing that it was due the next day. Those essays would be formulaic and boring, and when I deleted one in a bout of rage, I would inevitably be able to re-write something in time for my deadline.
It’s never a linear journey from hate to love. In high school, I started reading long essays and New Yorker reviews; I found value in the written word, even as I continued to hate my own experience of crafting it. I watched slam poetry videos on YouTube, laughing, tearing up, never considering that I could do anything of the sort. But when I started working on my college essays, I had to dig deep to try and show enough of a personality to outshine my mediocre extracurriculars.
I wrote dozens of drafts trying anything and everything: an essay about my favorite pairs of headphones, one about my role model Kanye West (2015 was a lifetime ago), another about art history. A flip had switched — I wasn’t anywhere close to tears, no, I was having fun writing.
That was where it all started. Over a decade later, I’ve been writing a newsletter for nearly nine years and have published some pieces and poems elsewhere.
This year, I wanted to take writing more seriously. I figured that I lacked the knowledge to write better without help. Surely, the difference between an unserious writer and a serious writer was knowing about critical theorists and what they stood for. Surely, I could be a serious writer who wrote about serious things, like social problems and the economy. Some of my most successful writer friends were like that, so why couldn’t I be? I signed up for a few classes, learned about Kant and excellent writers, and wrote some poor imitations of their work.
To my surprise, I hated it. Even though I enjoyed learning about these things as an intellectual exercise and reading the works of great authors, I couldn’t find myself in this work. For instance, I could never see myself writing anything like Joan Didion’s “New York: Sentimental Journeys”. It’s an incredibly well-done and well-researched piece that gives a serious subject the respect it deserves, as you’d expect from a well-renowned and serious journalist. But that will never be me; I couldn’t write so seriously.
At some fundamental level, I had internalized the idea that the only way for me to be serious about my work was to write highly serious work. I imagined what came naturally to me — offering dumb puns and jokes, making jokes or melodrama out of everything — would diminish the quality of my work. Basically, I came to think that “fun” wasn’t as important for my work as being “interesting” or “illuminating.”
As I wrestled with the idea of seriousness vs fun, I decided to look at some of my favorite authors. I decided to place them on the continuum from fun to serious. Ernest Hemingway and Jhumpa Lahiri were serious writers, while John Steinbeck and Haruki Murakami were fun. While the serious authors tackled a range of topics and emotionality, they felt mostly focused on tragic events, compared to the lightness of mundanity that appears in the dialog and pacing of the fun authors’ works.
I realized that when a work of art is too serious, it feels distant from my reality. In my eyes, life is a mix of humor and fun and darkness and absurdity. Every day, or at least every week, there is something to crack a smile about, so shouldn’t our art reflect that properly? I respected the work of all of these writers, but my worldview aligned more strongly with the fun authors, and I wanted my work to look more like theirs than the serious ones.
What came next was self-acceptance. I am not a serious person, I whispered to myself with a stupid grin on my face. I’m a 28-year-old man who sleeps in a Tom & Jerry t-shirt and bright purple shorts. I get really into jumping rope every time I see a boxing movie so I can be as cool as the main character. I have written an essay mentioning cooking almost every single time I’ve cooked a meal, even though I can’t make it through a recipe without calling my mom to help me fix a mistake.
I am not a serious person, I’m someone who wants to have fun playing with words on the page. And I’ll do it. Now and forever.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - Covers by Justice Der - 3 hours of instrumental covers by an excellent guitar player
POEM - “Goodtime Jesus” by James Tate - But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day.