Last year I taught creative writing at a residential arts high school for gifted students. Each of my 30 students had been hand-picked from across the state. They were talented. They had applied for and been accepted specifically into the creative writing department. And yet, a couple of weeks into the semester, I realized something: they didn’t like writing.
Well, not anymore. They had liked it at one point, presumably. Back when it lived in their diaries and book margins and notes apps. Back when a pen and paper inexplicably produced, inside their lonely middle school hearts, the thrill of connection and discovery. But at some point—between the decision to study it nearly full-time and the moment I entered their classroom—the relationship between these students and their writing had turned acrimonious.
This was a problem, obviously, because compulsory writing is almost always bad (especially in an academic setting). The writer’s reluctance seeps into the work, so the work can never pop or fizzle or have that quality of aliveness that comes only from the author’s own aliveness at the time of creation.
I’ve graded enough undergraduate essays to tell you: when writing becomes a hill to climb instead of a field in which to romp, the strenuous labor of the writer transfers to the reader (in my case, an underpaid, overworked lecturer in the English department). So the act of creation that was a hill-to-climb creates a reading experience that is also like climbing a hill. Any writing professor can tell you, with rare exceptions, reading student essays feels like climbing hill after hill after hill. (After hill.)
But I wasn’t just concerned about reading a bunch of bad writing. I desperately wanted my students to enjoy what they were doing. By the tender age of sixteen, they had practically bet their lives on their talent. If they couldn’t muster some enthusiasm for it, it was going to be a long road.
This is how I began thinking about play.
I once took a writing class in which the instructor threw random words at us and made us incorporate them into whatever sentence we were writing at that exact moment. Words like walrus and raspy and kaleidoscope. The first time, I expected the exercise would prompt us to scribble pure nonsense. I assumed it was a warm-up to the real thing we would write next.
But what we came up with wasn’t nonsense. Sometimes it was (bizarrely) brilliant and off-kilter in the best way. It stretched our brains past the easy grab (a familiar word or metaphor) toward something completely new. Would I have naturally compared my father to a walrus? No. But hey, in that description I’d just accidentally (and almost subconsciously) written, I stumbled upon maybe a single new idea about my dad, something I never could have accessed on my own. Maybe I was reminded of the bristle of whiskers or mottled skin like leather or brute strength in unexpected form.1
The spontaneous quality of the writing sometimes turned out smart—but always turned out fun. When the writer is surprised during creation, the reader is surprised while reading. And when surprise is done well, it is fun. This playful quality is, after all, what separates creative writing from other types of writing. We are making something out of nothing. We are making something new.
Anyway, I was sick of climbing hills. I started reading everything I could find about play in the classroom. And then I started reading books about play in general. I discovered the brilliance of Lynda Barry. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was trying to access the same whimsy in these students I’d accessed in my own writing class when my instructor had thrown the wheels of my thinking off the rutted grooves of my brain into the wilderness beyond. Toward the walrus.
Mid semester, I had an idea. At home, I grabbed a giant trash bag and headed to my kids’ playroom. Into the bag I stuffed crayons, board games, watercolors, Play-doh, and MagnaTiles. The next time I went to school, like a petite female Santa, I hefted the bag onto the center table.
This, I said, is today’s assignment. Play.
For a moment, my students were dead silent. (It’s worth pointing out that, at this point, they were as ornery about me as they were about writing itself.) I briefly considered hurling myself out the window. (High schoolers are scary, man.)
And then they smiled. And they huddled around the trash bag like it was Christmas morning. They made Play-doh sculptures and drew with magic markers and, over in the corner, played a heated game of Twister. They played.
This was not brilliant pedagogy on my part. I was discouraged and exhausted and just throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping something would stick. Well, this noodle stuck. I watched, just for a couple of hours, these pressurized-cans-of-teenage-angst laugh, breathe deeply, and act silly.
Play unlocked our work together for the rest of the year. One week I brought in just the Play-doh and asked them to sculpt (badly) an object that was important to them before writing about it. One week I made them sketch metaphors as if they were literal. One week I brought in an improv comedian who made them wiggle their arms and shout silly phrases. Early on during a freewrite assignment, one of the students froze mid-sentence and said, “Oh my god. I just remembered why I liked writing.”
In turn, play seeped into my own work. After a couple years working on a book I was now sick-to-death of, I began to experience a cognitive loosening around the art of writing. As if by magic, I had loads of new ideas, and the work seemed fun again. I wrote things without a publication or audience or goal in mind, just because it felt good to write.
It wasn’t just the work. I realized I hadn’t been having much fun in my real life, either. In the Trump/covid era, I had been incessantly reading news and nonfiction and trying to work out some complicated thought problems, and I had started taking myself way too seriously. Instead of my work feeling like a hill to climb, my relationships were feeling that way. As in, I was the hill.
Not for the first time in my life, play unlocked something in me.
To experience play, you have to be willing to do a few things first.
You must relinquish your fears of what other people will think.
You must abandon their ideas about how you should behave.
You must forget time.
You must loosen up all the rules you are white-knuckling because they give your life the illusion of shape and sense.
You must wiggle and giggle and open yourself to embarrassment.
You must be willing to surprise even yourself.
There’s a place for rules—but most of us don’t need to be told that. The moment we enter a school building, tiny creatures soft as Play-doh, we become citizens of regulation. By young adulthood, the rules are inside our bones, silently dictating the way we move and breathe and think.
In modern society, play is a radical act.
Silliness isn’t a warm-up for the serious thing you’re going to create next. Play is, itself, a mindset (“yes and!”) that proliferates possibility.
We have been taught to reach for the easy word, the easy way. We’ve been taught our only choices are the ones someone else has laid out for us. We’ve been taught the only places worth discovering are the ones marked on a map. We’ve been taught everything we do ought to make sense.
But beyond the rules, something weirder and wilder is happening. You can find it only if, when you want to reach for what’s expected of you, you stretch past it.
Past the predictable toward the weirder, wilder walrus.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with my actual dad, who bears zero resemblance to a walrus.
Lindsey, I so love your writing, and I also love the idea of play. You are so right - no matter our age, we need to play. When we visited Sue and family in Savannah last spring, we enjoyed their monthly family night where we played games together. Putting play in the context you did in this piece makes so much sense! Every high school writing teacher should have access to it! Love to you and yours. Debbie