Why So Serious?

Don’t worry–I’m not going to make a pencil disappear. Your eyes are safe.

While I could blog about The Dark Knight, I’m not going to. Tempting? Yes. But let’s stay on track, here.

Question: have you forgotten how to have fun?

Are you gripping onto things so tightly that your knuckles are white? So afraid to let go that it’s giving you rope burn?

Yeah, me too.

Robin Hood

I just finished the first round of edits for my Robin Hood novel (yay)!

But let me tell you something: I really struggled to write the first draft.

Why? So many reasons…

• This book is my first long-form project at school.
• It’s a dystopian sci-fi, a genre I haven’t written in a while.
• It’s from a teenage boy’s perspective (I am not a teenage boy, despite the outfits I sometimes wear).

Overall, it was a lot for my brain to handle.

So I tried to take it super seriously. That’s the logical solution, right? I wanted to make sure I was on task–no messing around. I had deadlines to meet. Scenes to write.

I was like, “I’ve gotta nail the voice. It needs to be so good.”

And each day…I dreaded sitting down to write.

I lamented. “Why? Why am I not enjoying this?”

It’s like that one Capt. Holt quote from Brooklyn 99. “Why is no one having a good time? I specifically requested it.”

That’s when I realized: my characters were supposed to be having fun.

They were supposed to be having fun, but I wasn’t having fun about it.

My version of Robin Hood doesn’t have “merry men.” They’re all kids, so I call them the Lost Boys. But the concept is the same: they’re merry. They cannot, for the life of them, take anything that seriously.

And then there was me! Trying to write that kind of attitude while being Scrooged-up in the corner of my office!

I was trying to write about this group of goofy, wayward teenage boys, but I gave myself no room to be goofy or wayward! Now, I’m not condoning waywardness, per se, I just mean that I’d given myself such a rigid structure on how to write this book that I wasn’t connecting to it.

In my effort to do a good job, I’d taken all the fun out of the process.

“Okay,” I hear you say. “So what? Does everything have to be fun? Sometimes you just gotta buckle in, grit your teeth, and get things done. Right?“

You can tell.

If a writer is miserable writing a book, chances are you’ll be able to tell when you read it.

Same goes for the rest of life. If you sow grumpy seeds, you’ll get grumpy flowers.

For my Lost Boys, fun is what keeps them going. They’re orphans in a sci-fi dystopia–if they stopped to “take things seriously,” they probably wouldn’t get up in the morning. They definitely wouldn’t see the point in fighting back. Their story would end before it began, and they–and I–would have nothing to show for it.

It’s a fact of life: we can’t be perfect. But sometimes we try to be anyway. We think that will help us get closer to the impossible goal. I’m not saying it’s bad to put effort into something. It’s not bad to care.

But there is a line between care and obsession, and I think a lot of us are really good at blurring that line.

Seriously?

I’m not saying we should never take things seriously. Like I said above: it’s not bad to put effort into something.

I just think “seriously” is a bad word for it.

It’s like love. C.S. Lewis wrote a whole book on the fact that the English language needs more than one word for love. One word just doesn’t cut it–there are too many kinds!

“Serious” is too serious of a word. There should be something in the middle, right? Something in-between caring too much and caring too little?

I suppose the word “rationally” will have to do for now. It’s sort of serious, but with less of an edge.

When faced with a hard task, it’s good to approach it rationally. Know what you’re dealing with, how long you have, and what assets you have at your disposal.

But hey. Chances are, it’s not life and death. Once you loosen your grip, you might find that hanging on isn’t actually so bad.

---