Making writing fun

I write down a lot of ideas for things to write about. You'd never know that, though, because If you look at my blog or this site, you'll see that I approximately never make any progress on these. These ideas sit on my todo list for a while, until they eventually get pruned after I've lost the motivation to pursue them.

The things that I do end up writing fall within systems: my daily private journal, my monthly obligatory update article, the well-known structures for short-form posts on this site. Less exploratory, more structured; less fun, more rote.

I've been bouncing off of this issue for ages. Here's some angles that I've spent far too long thinking about:

It's not like I'm not qualified to write. I have a master's degree in English — a research-focused one, to boot, where I wrote a lot for my coursework. I write like how I talk. LLMs love using em dashes because they want to sound like me.

It's not like I don't have adequate tooling. I'm writing this right now on a bespoke app I built for myself primarily to try to solve this "I don't write enough" problem.

It's not like I'm too busy. I'm effective enough with my time that I can afford to make time for the things that are important. But I don't want to measure writing in time spent, or output, quantitatively or qualitatively.

I want to write because I want to write. I want to refine my ideas, instigate other people to tell me how to make those ideas better; I want to help people not make the same silly mistakes I've made while figuring things out.

I sat down to write what I'm writing now because I had the thought: when did writing stop being fun?

And then, after thinking about it, I realized: has writing ever been fun for me?

Coursework was mostly not fun. Chasing clout is maybe fun for other people, but I find it very much not fun. Getting dunked on for having hot takes is not fun. Being the tallest nail that gets the hammer is suffering one must endure.

I want for this to be a restorative practice, even when it's hard, like playing a difficult game to unwind after work, or working through a difficult novel.

The way to get there is to stop adding on the things that make writing not fun and restore writing to its natural state. Working on problems, personal enrichment, crafting clever turns of phrase, if not polluted by anything else, are simply inherently fun.

Like Thích Nhất Hạnh said: "there is no way to happiness — happiness is the way."

It doesn't have to be a big event, it doesn't have to do numbers, it doesn't have to be a distraction from something "more important," it can just be this.

Expectation leads to disappointment. If you don't expect something big, huge, and exciting … usually … um, I don't know, it's just not as… yeah.

—Mark Zammuto