Play is anything but pointless for the unloosing of creativity.  Some writers swear by its value.  According to romance novelist Phoebe Conn, “Writing is just fun for me, wonderful fun.  It isn’t like work, it’s never drudgery.”

And this is how novelist Phyllis Gebauer describes her thought processes before and after sitting down to write: “Yippee! Now I can work on my book, get out of here, ‘play’ with my people.”

In a review of the book The Evolution of Childhood by Melvin Konner, Benjamin Schwarz writes, “The smartest mammals are the most playful, so these traits have apparently evolved together.”  According to Konner, “Combining as it does great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness, [play] is a central paradox of evolutionary biology.”

Play, concludes the reviewer:

seems to have multiple functions — exercise, learning, sharpening skills — and the positive emotions it invokes may be an adaptation that encourages us to try new things and learn with more flexibility. In fact, it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM PLAYING

What I’ve noticed in my own writing is this:  Once I’ve thought actively about a problem at my desk, and I’m feeling overwhelmed and without a solution, I take a break and lie down, or I do something else.  Then I think about the problem in a looser way than before.  I let my mind play with the ideas, without trying to force anything.  But very often a usable idea comes to me, often an anecdote or some way to proceed with my project.  This looseness, I’ve discovered, is not necessarily low cortical arousal, but arousal allowed to run sideways.  Then, once I’ve gotten a handle on how to start or re-start, flow can begin.

It’s funny, but the way you play can tell you a lot about your own ability to let go and be creative.  I’ll use myself as an example, quoting from my book Writing in Flow:

My husband Stephen and I like to play computer adventure games, not the kind where hand-eye coordination is required (blast the alien before it conquers your planet), but the kind where you’re trying to figure something out and achieve some goal.  When we began to play many years ago, elaborate graphic adventures had not yet taken over from simple text-only games.  With those older games, you can type in anything you can think of, and the machine is programmed to respond, even if only to type back, “I don’t understand this command.”

At first, Stephen would come up with outlandish ideas to try in order to get past some obstacle in the game, and I would routinely squawk, “You can’t do that!”  I have no idea what I was afraid of, other than the new, the untried, the unexpected.  We both still joke about the time when we (us on the screen, in the game) needed to get past a stubborn guard to go up some stairs to get a key to continue to the next scene of the game.  We tried everything logical, while a little frog jumped nearby and made inane comments.  For two or three evenings of game play we remained stuck and frustrated.  Finally, Stephen typed in, “Throw the frog at the wall.” I, of course, was horrified (remembering childhood pals who had done hurtful things to frogs).  But it worked.  When we “threw” the frog, it grabbed the needed key for us, and so we bypassed the recalcitrant guard and got unstuck.

I’ve since thought a lot about my habitual risk-aversion and finally realized that there was actually no risk involved in games.  Then I was able to loosen up.  My real test came when I made a move in a game that resulted in the blowing up of a horse into grisly bits.  It didn’t solve the puzzle, but I didn’t let the pretend consequence upset me.   Since then, I have often considered whether some experimental action I wanted to take was as risky as it first seemed.  That’s why I know it’s possible to become more open.  Even if your usual tendency is to holler, “But you can’t…!”, or “I mustn’t!”,  you can learn to pull a switch in your thinking and allow yourself to do whatever it is anyway.

It’s only play.

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    Last reviewed: 21 May 2010