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 placed 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.
i relate to this without having ever realized it- thank you for putting my inkling into words! similarly, i have also always loved writing, but i have not been drawn to it as a craft as much… felt like all my writing would be is a silly column or public diary. but fun is where we add value and how we speak to the world!