“Joyful Effort: Practice & Play”

New Substack post + A professional development workshop at StoryStudio

I wrote about the Buddhist concept of "joyful effort" as it relates to practice and play in writing. I also discuss the importance of ritual in my writing practice, Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule, the Sanskrit word “lila,” and Van Gogh’s mediocre (and maybe just plain bad) early drawings. I'm delighted that so many people have found this article to be encouraging!

Excerpt from “Joyful Effort: Practice & Play”

I also taught a secular version of this mindset in a professional development workshop StoryStudio, a nonprofit creative writing based in Chicago where I work as a consultant. The instructors and staff are incredibly talented and hardworking. In this hybrid online/in-person workshop, we discussed strategies on how to teach practice and play in the creative writing classroom, and why these mindsets are so important in our own writing practices.

If you’re a business or nonprofit leader who would like this training adapted for your staff, please reach out using the contact form.

Below is the description for the training:

Our most dedicated students often experience the same complaint that we feel in our own writing: this work is hard.

We should acknowledge that writing takes discipline and effort, but how can we also encourage our students to infuse their writing process with joy and playfulness? What are ways in which the time spent “warming-up” for the big game invites new possibilities, spontaneity, and surprising directions? How can we communicate to our students that writing, like any other artistic discipline, takes hours of practice? And that practice is essential to mastery?

In this professional development workshop, we’ll form our own unique pedagogies around the idea of practice and peer-share some of our favorite writing exercises to help students reframe the hard work of writing as a form of play.

Thank you to everyone who showed up, online or in-person! (And thank you program curator and author, Ananda Lima, for the photos!)