The other day I was playing with my daughter. She had instructed me to help her lay some Paw Patrol playing cards in a path across the house.
I have no idea what the game was or why we were doing it.
What I do know is that it was very important to my daughter that we did this. It was her sole focus for that 15 minutes. She hasn’t wanted to do it again, nor has she mentioned it since. Evidently we achieved our aim first time around. Cause that’s how we roll.
But I couldn’t help but be struck at the time by how completely she dedicated herself to this entirely arbitrary thing, for no other reason than, I guess, because she wanted to.
She had decided that it was important to her. Which made it important.
As authors we’re supposed to take it ‘seriously’
In this author game, or content creator game, we’re often told to start with our ‘Why’. And then you lay on target audience, niche, market fit, and so on.
You can quickly become lost in trying to justify why you’re sitting there writing a book every evening.
I mean how many of us got started by saying something like, ‘I want to hold up a mirror to society, where’s my pen?’
I don’t know that there’s a market for my book. I don’t know who its ideal reader is. And why am I writing it? Well, because I want to.
And why did I start writing these articles? Er, because I wanted to say stuff and I wanted there to be at least a small chance that someone else would actually read it. I had been blogging on my own site, but nobody was looking at that.
But why do I want to say things in the first place? I don’t know. Because I’ve got things to say? Because they pop up into my head and it feels like an idea that isn’t expressed is an idea wasted?
Yet you can see I’m already going back down that rabbit hole. I’m trying to explain myself.
Too much time and energy spent on justifications
There’s an old episode of the science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf where the characters are tracked down by a being called the Inquisitor, whose job it is to make sure that of all the potential versions of a person who could exist, the right one is the one that got the chance.
The characters are forced to justify themselves. To make things even harder, the person tasked with judging the value of their existence is themselves.
I constantly feel like I’m stuck in that episode. And yet putting playing cards on the floor with my daughter the other day made me realise: I don’t need to justify myself.
Doing what I love, just because I love it
I write books and stories because I like writing books and stories. At whatever single digit age I first sat down to write my first story, I didn’t bother thinking about why I was doing it, or what I hoped to achieve.
When I started writing my first book at 13 I didn’t even know I was writing a book. I was just bored in a science lesson and wrote ‘Chapter One’ at the beginning of a blank page in my notebook.
I wrote a few chapters, typed them up and printed them out, and then showed it to some people. They laughed (which is a good thing; it was supposed to be funny).
It’s pretty much that, and nothing else, that drove me to want to share my writing with the world. To keep making people laugh.
And why do I like making people laugh? Because it’s nice. Does there have to be a point beyond that?
More reasons exist, it’s just that they don’t have to
Of course, I could go deeper here and talk about how comedy provides a safe space, a sandbox if you like, in which we can explore in a low stakes way not only the commonality of the human condition but also the challenges we face as we try to coexist, and the tensions that can create.
Or that, at an interpersonal level, comedy is the best diffuser of tension and allows us to build closer, more intimate relationships fuelled by laughter.
In the same way I can talk about how the stories I tell aim to study parts of human society or morality and ask big questions about the choices we make, the things we believe and the systems we follow, whilst also having a damn good time and a lot of laughs.
Don’t be ashamed – we’re all just out here trying to have a good time
The above sort of seems like post-rationalisation. This is the adult brain trying to impose some kind of logic and reason on the whimsy of a child.
I like telling stories. I like telling jokes. That’ll do, professor.
Just like my daughter laying down those playing cards, I’m not going to waste any more time justifying my drive to create or pursue the things I enjoy.
It’s not that I can’t; it’s just that I really don’t need to.
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Header photo by Juan Rumimpunu on Unsplash
