Play projects are vital: they're the place you try things out, make mistakes, explore new ways, or stretch a skill that your current work-in-progress isn't using. Or even dump out the rubbish idea that's clogging the pipes, keeping the good ideas back. The idea of the finished product, of perfection, is so luring and tempting, though. It's so easy to start thinking, Ha! And because I'm playing, this will be brilliant and perfect and the book will look like... And that thought freezes you up, just at the moment you were shaking loose to play.
Rope of Words is now a beautiful, handbound book with full-colour illustrations throughout, in a limited edition of 600 books which I spent last weekend signing. Having watched the artist finesse every last detail, I breathed out in relief that I'd spent every bit as much care on the words. If I'd set out to write it with that degree of perfection, though, I couldn't have. In fact, if I'd set out to write it, I couldn't have.
I've written before about process versus product, that tension at the heart of creativity. Even while product may be what we're ultimately aiming for (the finished story, poem, book, artwork), we need to start with process and play.
Rope of Words started as a play project, a random go-nowhere few paragraphs that needed years of rest before I could pull them back out with any objectivity. I came back to it as a play project too, when I needed to find a way back into my own writing, with something less significant than my magnus opus / magnficent octopus to work on. Even then, it stayed a play project, and went back into the drawer for another year and a half.
It reminds me, constantly, of the value of play projects: not everything has to be perfect, not everything has to have a purpose and a plan, not everything even has to be finished. Some of those play projects may, in time, grow into finished products which we feel proud of, but not all of them. Some are just doodles, sketches, midwives for other ideas. We have to let them be that, or we lose the play entirely.
I have various tricks and shenanigans, to keep a sense of play space for myself, whatever else I'm working on. One is to always have a project on the go that is just for yourself, wholly self-indulgent. A second trick is the exact reverse: to write for someone else, as a gift, instead of for publication. A poem for a friend. A nonsense story for a kid. I wrote a King's-Quest-inspired story for my nephew, set in University Parks, where the elegance of my prose was thrown out of the window in favour of swords, pirates, giants, witches, and the rest. (You can download King's Quest III, by the way. Just saying.)
A third approach is to have an "ideas book" where you can start scribbling the scrap of an idea and keep going as long as you like – or leave it at one sentence. I have two of these at the moment: a beautiful little Paperblanks notebook just the right size to fit in an evening bag, and a £1 sparkly notebook from Poundland which lives in the living room for all those epiphanies one has in the middle of Doctor Who or Game of Thrones.
And fourthly, perhaps most importantly, is to have play time. Out at a coffee shop on a Saturday morning, perhaps. Home alone in the evening with candlelight, music, and wine. Taking your full lunch hour so you can eat and spend half an hour in a snug spot as play time. Pull out the notebook, unlid the pen, see what happens. Follow it, see where it goes.
Last year, as I talk about in The joy is in the doing, I had a play project for the entire summer and well into the depths of winter, learning afresh exactly that: Follow it, see where it goes. Keep it secret; keep it safe. It doesn't matter if this bit is rubbish. No counting, no measuring, it's the sitting here writing that counts. That play project is now creeping into the realms of Things That Might Turn Into A Real Thing, but that's fine, so long as I find somewhere else that gives me space to play. I think that's the oxygen that keeps all the other writing alive, and free.
