Let Me Play and I’m a Happy Man

I’m not usually a guy who engages in literary exercises. If I’m writing, I want the words I produce to count toward something.

Now I understand there is value in learning, and no word written in pursuit of craft is ever wasted. I get that. But I also know myself well enough to realize that I get impatient when words on the page aren’t leading me toward completing a work in progress.

It’s not a great trait, but we all work with what we’ve got. (I also don’t like to read books about writing, though I love to buy them and have a bookcase full, but that is a blog post for another day.)

So after laying this groundwork, you’ll understand why I was less than enthusiastic when October rolled around and one of our assignments was to interview a character for our upcoming NaNoWriMo novel. I admit that I had an advantage over some of the other Café contributors because I’d planned to use the month of November to complete a novel I was already writing. But that didn’t stop me from doing a whole lot of internal bitching about the task.

This went on for a while until I finally decided to just shut up and write. (This, by the way, has proven to be great advice whenever I’m trying to avoid an assignment.)

Once I committed myself to putting something on the page, the interview almost wrote itself. For anyone interested, it was called “Failed Conversion” and appeared October 8, 2012.

In the piece, I took a minor character from my novel, Mike Mackey, someone who was more comic relief than anything else in the story, and created a scenario in which a radio interview gets completely out of hand. It was a fun way to explore his personality, and it also gave me a chance to bring a little adversity into his life.

In the few appearances Mackey makes in my book, he’s obviously a guy who moves through life with almost no conscience or consequence to his actions. I was able to change that by banging out about 1,000 words, and I got the opportunity to play. I tried to tell a few jokes, tweak people in general, and just be over the top ridiculous.

I had a ball.

My takeaway from all of this is that I need to try to find the humor in every assignment from here on out. Even if it’s not there, I need to make it fun. Because if I’m having a good time writing it, you might have a good time reading it.

And, of course, the ultimate goal is for all of you to realize you adore me.

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