Writing Is Supposed to Be Fun

I’ve been super into fanfiction lately.

If you know me well, you know that I tend to fall down rabbit holes of content consumption. One week, I’ll be watching all of Emily Blunt’s movies and interviews and spouting off fun facts about her like we’re friends (which is often when my actual friends reconsider spending time with me.) Then, the next week, I’ll be up to my eyeballs in physics textbooks, trying to understand black holes (they’re there, but they’re also…not?!) My obsessions are very intense, but they tend to be relatively short-lived.

But, this fanfiction thing? It’s been almost three months, and I am now so far down the rabbit hole I can’t even see daylight anymore. Send help. Or the Mad Hatter, if he’s available.

Now, in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a quick synopsis: fan fiction is anything someone creates that takes parts of a pre-existing piece of content or media and changes it. You might think that’s a recent thing, but fanfiction has existed almost as long as fiction: Virgil’s The Aeneid is a spin-off of Homer’s The Odyssey, and things just went off the rails from there. From Paradise Lost to Fifty Shades of Grey, fanfiction is a staple of both classic and modern literature.

I always knew that fanfiction existed—I’m too much of a nerd not to know that, come on—but until recently, I didn’t realize that a lot of it is really good. And some of it? Some of it is absolutely amazing. It’s “make yourself a bowl of popcorn and get comfy because you are about to binge through 100,000 words in an evening” level of amazing. And I’m loving it.

But mostly, I’m loving that it is a constant reminder that writing is supposed to be fun.

In the things I’ve been reading, the writers often start each segment or chapter with their notes. They explain why they decided to write this particular version of the story, whether it was tough to sort out the plot holes, how sorry they are for putting a beloved character through a trial by fire, and so on. But again and again and again I’ve read some version of this from a writer:

“I wrote this because I wanted to, and I thought it would be fun.”

These writers do things like throw a particularly awful character off a 30-story building, “because it feels good to watch him suffer.” Or genderswap a character because “I wanted to see how the story would change if she were a man.” It’s trial and error, experiments, and playground antics coming through a keyboard. And because no one is making money from it, the only consequences are whether or not your story has readers.

Which, of course, is important to a writer. But that’s how we learn. We learn by trying a new turn of phrase and seeing if anyone comments. Or by chopping sentences up into tiny pieces and seeing if y’all can still read it. Or by killing off a character and waiting to see if anyone wails about it.

And that experimentation, that self-indulgent “I wanted to try something so I wrote this” perspective? It’s so fun to read. The incredible author and editor Toni Morrison once said, “Write the book you want to read.” And obviously, I’m not going to argue with Toni, but I would just like to add this: Have fun writing the book you want to read. That joy, that emotion that you have while you write? That comes through to us when we read your words.

And writing is supposed to be fun.