3 Reasons Play Is The Best Way To Develop Creative Writing
When you write a story online, does it feel like all work or play? What if taking your writing opportunities too seriously stifled your creative writing, rather than unleashing heaps of energy to change the world through your words?
And now comes the best part.
These three ideas combining play and writing could boost your creative writing activities to the next level.
Let me explain.
I used to think everything I wrote had to have a purpose.
I thought I couldn’t write for fun.
I thought spending time composing stories and ideas had to be useful, for it to be worthwhile.
But I realised creative writing should be fun, filling it with ‘musts’ and ‘have to’. Even more important, have you forgotten that creative writing should be fun and creative too?
There is nothing worse than writing because we have to; it can lead to stifled ideas and a loss of imagination. Writing sentences and stories to see what happens is how we build creativity. It helps remove judgment from our writing. We learn to write without critiquing ourselves, and this allows our ideas to flourish. It teaches us to be brave and bold. Once we share real emotion and imagery with the page, we can learn to hone and tweak our craft. Once we’ve first learnt to be free. Not only that, one of the best ways to develop creativity, and to become freer within our writing, is through play. Cambridge University, even argues play is more than just important for creativity; it’s often necessary.
3 Reasons Why Play Is The Best Way To Develop Creative Writing
Play puts our brains into a psychological state where it’s okay to fail. Which means the stakes are low. We have nothing to lose. We can write without fear of failure; we can write only to have fun. This state allows us to explore more freely, and this freedom leads to creativity. When we aren’t afraid to fail when we know there is no ‘right’ answer we can loosen up. We accept there are no rules, and we can embrace the unknown. We take failure as a given, rather than being afraid of it. See where the unknown takes you with your writing.
Play increases our capacity for ideas travelling into the land of ‘what if?’ When we diminish guidelines, we can feel more comfortable trying new things with our writing. Play ensures there are fewer barriers to our creativity. Instead of leaning on old patterns of behaviour such as, ‘I always write murder mysteries’, we can try new things. ‘What if I wrote a romance mystery?’ or ‘What if I didn’t write poetry and tried something new?’ The land of ‘what if…’ can lead to new ideas as we let go of barriers and assumptions.
Play offers us a chance to delve into pretend worlds and make-believe. While these ideas can seem abstract and extreme, sometimes the results they produce are genuine. Developing the initial spark of an idea to become a new and exciting story or creative project. Which might have been less appealing without the injection of play. This increases our confidence as we start to develop our own rules.
Play doesn’t mean that we don’t take our creative writing seriously.
However, it can help provide respite from some of our more significant projects. It can help our creativity muscle grow and develop. But mostly, its vital role is to help us keep creative writing fun and imaginative. In Stuart Brown’s TED Talk about play, he argues, ‘nothing lights up the brain like play’. The more we can ‘light our brains up’, the more we can see the world from different viewpoints. Then we can ask, ‘What if?' The more our stories will surprise and entertain our readers the more joy we’ll spark writing them.
What could you do to play with your creative writing today?
Why not try some writing that is entirely new to you? Could you try a new genre or a new form? Set a timer for fifteen minutes and don’t stop writing until it goes off.
Have fun with this free story generator, see where the characters and plot take you.
Spend five minutes writing a Haiku. (Here’s how to write a Haiku).
Try writing with a friend. One person starts a story, and you take turns writing chapters and characters.
Journal every day for one week and see what happens.
We’d love to know how you got on. Use the form below and tell us how you have brought play into your creative writing.
To increase your play try our writing workbooks …
Photo by Veronica García on Unsplash
