In a recent post, Janice Hardy extolled the virtues of writing a novel just for fun.
A few years ago, Hardy hit a roadblock with her writing. Her current manuscript wasn’t progressing and she began to dread writing. Even taking a break to work on a non-fiction project didn’t help. Eventually, she jumped on an entirely different fiction project, in an unfamiliar genre. “It didn’t matter if I’d never written an urban fantasy before—if it was ‘just for fun’ who cared if it was terrible?”
Hardy started writing during National Novel Writing Month and had the first draft of a novel by the end of the month. ‘Aligning with NaNo was a lucky break for me, but it wasn’t the reason I’d written so much,” Hardy say. “It was my decision to write the book for fun and not worry if it ever got published. I wasn’t going to show it to my critique partners, I wasn’t going to send it to my agent. It was for me and me alone.”
Hardy identifies three ways this helped her get her writing mojo back:
- It reminded her why she loved writing in the first place. “Writing a novel I didn’t plan to show anyone freed me to do whatever I wanted,” she says. “I made cheesy pop culture references. I swore (something I don’t do in my teen novels). I enjoyed myself and ignored all the things that I’d have stressed over had this been a ‘real’ novel.”
- It let her stretch creatively. Adult urban fantasy was new for her. “Writing in the ‘real world’ had always been intimidating, because there were actual rules and laws, and making up everything was just so much easier,” she writes. “Mixing the real and the unreal was a challenge I actually had fun with.”
- It reset her writing focus. “The more I wrote, the more I realized (and accepted) that a writing slump was just my brain’s way of telling me I needed a break,” Hardy says. “As soon as I shifted back to writing for the joy of the story, writing became fun again.”
