GET BACK TO PLAY

By Kasie Whitener

I’m a swimmer. I started early, as a four-year-old on the six-and-under squad of my neighborhood team. When people ask, I say the only thing I’ve been doing longer than swimming is breathing.

I’m a writer. I started that early, too. In third grade I wrote stories about what happened at home after school that made my teacher chuckle and declare I’d be a fiction writer. In seventh grade I wrote my first novel on four spiral notebooks. When people ask, I say the only thing I’ve been doing longer than writing is swimming. And breathing.

I have left the pool for long stretches of time. Months, sometimes years, go by between me picking up the habit and slowly drifting out of it. When I return, I remember how fun it is to dolphin-kick through the deep end, to take that hard thrust off the wall and glide suspended in the quiet for just a moment.

Likewise, there were long periods of time when I didn’t write fiction. In graduate school I focused on literary criticism. My early career was spent developing marketing copy for print media. As a corporate trainer, I wrote process documentation. During my PhD program, I wrote weekly essays connecting ideas I’d read, demonstrating I was learning and understanding concepts. There was a decided purpose to my work, a destination for it, and I got used to writing being task oriented.

For years, stories bunny-hopped over meadowed pages in my mind, ducked behind trees in a sunlit wood, slipped in and out of shadows. The voices were there – Brian the spoiled college kid mourning his best friend’s suicide, Blue the vampire time-traveler falling for Lord Byron’s sister, Maisy Diller the aging rock star returning to her hometown, even Breezy and Sean circling one another like a pair of twin moons. The voices occupy me like permanent residents of a beach motel: ready to play in the sun whenever I am.

Once I began writing with purpose in 2012, I learned what needed to be done to become read-worthy, and the voices lined up dutifully to complete their tasks.

“Make us ready,” they said. “Share us with the world.”

And fiction writing became work. But that is only one frame through which I can see my writing life.

The other frame, shown to me by Derek Berry at last week’s SCWA Writing Conversations session, is: Writing is fun. Writing can be play.

Writing can be where I come, not to bleed on the page or forge a career for myself, but to explore ideas and fantasies and play with sound and smell and taste and feel.

I shouldn’t have to be reminded that I love to write. I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. And yet the reminder to enjoy it, to play, was such a surprising relief that I couldn’t wait to get back to the page.

To type this blog and tell you about it.