How prioritizing *play* in my writing gave me my career
I talk openly about all aspects of my writing life, from process to publishing journey. What I want to share here is the extent to which I credit an intentional practice of playful writing exercise for my career.
“Playful” is not what got my foot in the door. I wrote my first two books the old-fashioned way, which can best be described by paraphrasing that old Gene Fowler quote, do you know it?
I stared at a blank screen until drops of blood formed on my forehead.
Ha ha, no actual blood maybe, but you get the idea. In my memory, those years are a vague fog of struggle, with my desire to do this thing having to daily overcome the temptation to just fantasize about it instead, and my primary source of motivation a kind of amazed disgust with myself for not doing it. It had to actually get more painful not to write than it was to write. I hate that that’s what it took, but I got there. After 30+ years of wanting nothing so much as to BE A WRITER, I finished my first novel. It received several offers and sold quite nicely to a big-5 publisher, along with its sequel, which was also a “forehead-blood” book (even more so, as is often the case with second books). But:
My foot! Was in! The door!
Just not very securely, as it turned out. That big-5 publisher neglected to inform the public that my books existed (honestly, they had one job) and they didn’t become the phenomenon I’d lavishly foreseen in my fantasies. The sequel never even came out in paperback, and that’s a little piece of my heart that I’ll never get back. It was an inauspicious debut. Those books still have their cheerleaders out in the world (and I love you so much, so much), but far more commonly, readers think my fourth book was my first. Because my fourth book? My fourth book was THE DREAM.
Daughter of Smoke & Bone sold at auction (to a different big-5 publisher) for a jump-up-and-down-screaming-and-scare-the-baby amount of money. House-buying money. Life-changing money. I learned that publicists are a thing publishers have, and also marketing departments. Who knew?! Within a year, all my writer’s dreams had come true, along with others I hadn’t known to dream about. Themed launch parties, book tours in several countries, media, foreign editions, fan art, the works. A little later came the readers’ tattoos, pets and babies named after my characters, bestseller lists, international book festivals, luxury special editions, and more.
(Here’s part of my collection of foreign editions.)
The experience was night and day from my first book deal, but the truth is…the important thing is: the differences began long before it sold. They were woven into its roots from its earliest inception, and even before that, when it wasn’t yet a twinkle in my eye. Because I didn’t write it how I’d written the first two. Daughter of Smoke & Bone wasn’t a forehead-blood book. Neither was my third book, which paved the way for it (I’ll explain in a minute). No disgust motivation was required. They were…fun?
(Wait. Writing can be FUN?!)
(Yes! It can!)
Sure, there was struggle. My brain manufactures it: small-batch artisanal struggle, only the finest organic ingredients. A huge percentage of my creative energy is spent guiding my brain out of labyrinths of its own invention. (Oh, brain.) But with these books the labyrinths led me to amazing places. Struggle was secondary, often absent entirely, and I began to experience, for the first time ever, the states of grace other writers talked about and that I’d doubted truly existed. You know: when the characters “take over.” When the story “tells itself.” When the words seem to come “through you, not from you.” When you forget you’re even writing and lose yourself in the flow. These things had never happened to me before, and now they did (not always, not reliably, but they happened) and it made the writing not only more fun, but better. Cooler. Weirder. Deeper. Truer. And…it changed my life.
So what happened? I’m so glad you asked!
First, it didn’t just happen. I made it happen, and I’m stressing this not to pat my own back but to say: You can do it too. If your handkerchief budget is through the roof from mopping your bloody forehead, and you think people are lying to make you personally feel bad when they say their characters took over, and you want to write, NEED to write, but also kind of hate to write? Change is possible.
This is what I did, way back in 2006, little imagining the impact it would have:
I cultivated a practice of non-goal-oriented writing exercise, built a little community around it, and learned to play.
Timing-wise, I’d sold that first novel and was waiting for my first-ever editorial letter. I had the sequel to write but I couldn’t face it. I was mentally exhausted (bleeding from the forehead is exhausting), and, pending feedback, didn’t know how much might change. In the two years I’d been writing that book, I’d written nothing else, and I wanted to. I longed to be more prolific, and I longed to enjoy it.
Those were my goals:
- Write more.
- Enjoy it more.
This was in the blog heyday of the mid-aughts, and I had a blog. It was a very different time in social media, before the short-form platforms took over. People commented generously, it was very personal, and communities formed — all things that also happen on IG and Twitter, but it was different: deeper and more intimate. (A big part of why I started a Patreon was because I missed that, and it has become something even more special ❤️) So even though I wasn’t published yet and had no “professional following,” when I started a prompt-writing site with a blog-friend, I had a community ready to jump in and play with me. I made a habit of spending Sunday mornings writing these pieces and would sometimes go all day.
I want to be clear that my hopes were modest: Write more. Enjoy it more. That’s it. There was no voice in the back of my head whispering, “Play your cards right and this could lead to books that will change your life.” If there had been, that would have killed it. Everything that came about was a beautiful surprise, and looking back from here, I can see why it worked. The two key pieces of this “practice of non-goal-oriented writing exercise” were:
- “a practice”: aka forming a habit.
When you do something regularly over a span of time, you change your brain, rewiring neurons into new neural pathways — like dedicated highways — that make the behavior easier and more natural. As someone who struggled to get started, to not overthink, to not get mired in revision loops, the simple neuroscience of habit made it increasingly easy for me to access a more fruitful creative headspace. I learned to trust the process, chill out, and have fun.
- “non-goal-oriented”: This was crucial for me: that I start out with no expectations, in a spirit of pure exploration.
Have you ever dreamed up a story and been so excited to start writing it only to find, when you do, that the real thing you’re building one word at a time is a sickly wraith-version of the dream-thing in your head, so the whole experience feels like failure instead of creation?
No? Um, yeah, me neither.
Ha ha, actually, yes I have. The single biggest source of my struggle is perfectionism. And not, like, “cute” perfectionism that you humble-brag about, but tyrannical, nothing-is-ever-good-enough perfectionism that, unchecked, drives a disaster spiral of endless rewriting. It’s really hard to write through this kind of brain-noise, and a lot of the “vague fog of struggle” years of finishing my first novel were spent grimly developing strategies to keep going anyway.
But what I learned from prompt-writing is that it’s much harder for my perfectionism to tell me I’m falling short if I don’t have a goal to fall short of. You can’t get lost if you don’t care where you’re going, and you can’t fail if you don’t care what you’re doing! Ha. It’s such a simple hack, but it was magic for me to approach the page with a simple word or phrase, no expectations and no “gilt-framed portrait of the book” (in the words of Betty Friedman) — no unattainable dream-version to chase to inevitable disappointment.
Pretty much immediately, I started having fun. The results were delightful, surprising, and alive — mostly fragments, but some were almost story-shaped. Pretty much all of them felt like doorways I could choose to open or not, with whole worlds glittering just out of sight. It was so cool! The things that happen when you just start writing! I came to trust that I could sit down with a notebook, a pen, and a prompt, and, within a paragraph, be swept away into a scene or situation that would never otherwise have existed and that set my mind on fire. All without a drop of blood. Win!
I incorporated other exercises into my practice, my imagination burgeoned, and my relationship to my own creativity massively improved. Within a few months I was expanding some of the prompt pieces into short stories. Each one felt like a gift that had fallen out of a dream. One was published in an anthology, my first! Some others fit together on a loose theme of kissing, and I thought about submitting them to magazines.
“Or they could be a book,” said my husband.
And they became a book — my third. It sold to another major publisher, my husband illustrated it (it’s gorgeous), it was selected for a prestigious “buzz panel” at Book Expo, and got some nice attention. And then…
(I was such a noob, I knew nothing about awards. It was a kind of beautiful ignorance, honestly.)
…a few weeks after my daughter was born, my husband interrupted me showering to whisper, mystified, that “the…National Book Foundation?” was on the phone. I turned off the water and took the call, dripping, no idea what it was about. Well, that book — a trio of prompt-inspired stories I’d written for fun, that felt like gifts fallen from dreams — was shortlisted for the National Book Award.
That’s what I meant about it paving the way for my fourth book and all the glorious things that came next. Being shortlisted for the National Book Award doesn’t sell books, but it made editors aware of me at a time when I was writing my next book, and set the stage for that life-changing auction.
This is going long, so I’ll save the details of Daughter of Smoke & Bone for my next post. It too was the fruit of writing exercise, though in a different, less direct, and more surprising way that makes an even better argument for play. I cannot stress enough that the decision to prioritize FUN in writing delivered beyond my wildest dreams and was absolutely responsible for my career.
XO
[This is a truncated version of a longer post on my Patreon, where there’s a lot more on writing exercises, publishing, and process.]
Laini Taylor is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, the Strange the Dreamer duology, and other books. She’s been translated into more than thirty languages, shortlisted for the National Book Award, and won a Printz Honor. You can find more about writing, as well as a warm and active community of writers at all stages, at her Patreon and Discord, where she meets with members on Zoom every week.
