In a post on Lit Hub, Jane Roper says it’s time to stop hating writing and get back to having fun. “When I first started writing, a few years after college, it was literary fiction I was torturing myself with,” she writes. “I wrote stories that were quiet and painfully sincere, with characters that did a lot of walking, drinking, longing, regretting, and searching for things just out of reach.” Her stories were good enough to get her into an MFA program, but she felt they were lifeless.
“I wrote what I thought I should be writing—well-wrought, realistic fiction that would get me published,” Roper says. This continued until one day, a visiting author – British writer Jim Crace – suggested that she wasn’t having fun. “He told me that I needed to figure out what and how to write so that I could really dive in, let loose, and enjoy myself,” Roper writes. “My work would come alive when I did.”
Roper continued writing her unexciting (to her) MFA fiction but had fun writing humor pieces for various venues, including a blog. She also published a memoir written in her humorous voice. “But when it came to fiction, I more or less kept it straight, with the exception of the occasional side character for comic relief,” Roper adds.
But when she had trouble publishing her third novel, Roper knew she had to switch things up. As soon as she made this decision, the premise of a new novel came to her. “I could have written a serious novel exploring these themes,” she writes. “But the idea of it was utterly exhausting. There was no way I was going to spend years slogging my way through another not-that-fun-to-write book, only to be met with more rejection.”
Roper spent the next year having fun. The result: The Society of Shame, published this spring. “It’s not the kind of fiction I used to aspire to write,” she says. “But it’s a reflection of everything I’ve got: all the things I love to write about, the things that intrigue me, and the things I do best. And—surprise, surprise—it was an absolute blast to write.”
The lesson: Write what you want, not what you’re supposed to, and have some fun doing it.
