In marriage you often start on the same page with regard to e.g. some cultural property and continue on your daily round for a while only to find that one of you has gone way deeper and the other must catch up. In the case of my marriage at the moment, this is the really tremendous high school volleyball manga / anime Haikyuu! (I always forget how many exclamation points I’m supposed to add.) We watched the anime together through almost the end of its run, stopping not out of a lack of interest but out of the sheer difficulty of watching anything independently in a household with a large developing organism whose natural bedtime seems to be, like mine, “how late ya got?”, and whose apparent energy and focus levels seem, like our own, to be largely independent of the actual degree of exhaustion, which can only be divined from second-order effects like increasing mania or hyper-focus. Hooray!

Anyway, so my beloved partner realized that our general reluctance for one of us to forge ahead with a show we were watching together did not technically apply to reading the manga source material for said show. So, in the twinkling of an eye, I found myself two whole arcs behind in Haikyuu!!!! continuity, and lacking thereby key context for household discussions. I’ve been working, in my shambling and haphazard way, to catch up. So we have a lot of volleyball on the brain over here in Gladstone House these days! (I’m just up to volume 34 though, no spoilers on this channel please.)

One bit from the manga landed hard for me this week. One of the side characters, Bokuto, is a genius spiker who seems to be, at first glance, a bit of a mess in sports psych terms: swinging between total manic can’t miss energy and depressive malaise. But as the final tournament arc continues, he shines in situations where more level-headed players start to crumble. Trying to explain what’s going on inside his head—his philosophy of sport—he remembers something a coach told him when he was younger: “Do what’s fun, not what’s easy.”

Winning games? Getting a monster spike? Saving a play that seems totally beyond salvation? Staying on your feet when everyone’s fallen down? Blocking an opponent’s key play? Fun times. Even if you lose, if you gave it everything you had: that’s fun. And the work you put in to get there: that’s fun too, if you see it as part of the fun of the result. It’s worth working this hard to have this much fun!

It’s easy, of course, to lose. And taking it easy, in training, under developing your skills, makes it less likely that you’ll get to have more fun on the court, in games or practice.

If playing isn’t fun for you, of course, then that’s a whole other question: worth asking what you could be doing that you’d actually enjoy! And recovery, properly considered, and especially for those of us north of 40, isn’t “taking it easy” so much as… having fun to have fun?—it’s harder to have a good time if you’re recovering from an overtraining injury or running yourself (literally) into the ground, or burning yourself out.

I love this image; it’s a dichotomy that does a nice end-run around various protestant-pilled cultural dichotomies that boil down to misery (virtue, hanging on the cross) vs ease (fun, sloth, satan). To gesture in the direction of a whole other essay, I think there’s an Augustinian / Grand Inquisitorish lens here (true freedom vs. apparent freedom). But let me try to stay on the subject of writing.

Are we writing easy or are we writing fun? Take structure. So often the structure conversation gets bogged down in Procrustean prescriptivism (“this is the way stories work and if you don’t make your stories work this way you’re doing something wrong so please let me stuff your manuscript into the Story Mangler 3000”) vs a kind of madcap “I don’t have to explain my art to you, Warren” resistance to any notion that a complex work involving hundreds of thousands of decisions might be improved by thinking about some of those decisions. Are you doing structure easy or are you doing structure fun? Are you looking for a critical midpoint because a book told you to? Are you looking to put a conflict-conversation with an elder authority figure on page 19 because there’s a checklist? Are you writing an “I want song” because that’s what goes here? Or: have you found why it’s fun that the “I want song” goes here? Are you seeking a shape for the second act because you feel it’s not fun enough yet? Are you considering what choices might be more fun than the choices you have made, even if that involves a certain amount of rewriting?

On the line by line prose level, this explains the sort of blinking incomprehension with which I’ve found myself responding to well-meaning machine learning / model folks pitching me on the value of LLMs for composition. “Wouldn’t it be great to automate away the boring parts?” What boring parts? “You know, scene setting, describing banquets, telling me what color the sky is?” Oh, you mean the fun parts? (&, in before the ‘ugh, what a luddite’ crowd, I’m not saying here that ‘motor boats are inherently evil’—though if you steal someone’s stuff to make a motor boat, congratulations, you’re a thief—just that you’re asking an avid sailor, wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to do all that stuff with lines and cloth and wind and maybe, yuck, getting wet?) Or: if writing a section feels boring, uninteresting, if it feels easy or done, how does it become fun for you? That doesn’t mean funny, mind! In books, horror, heartbreak, misery can all be fun. What can make it wow you?

Or, spinning it around to think from the reader’s perspective: which reader are we aiming for and what is fun for that reader? A reader whose favorite author is, say, Cormac McCarthy or Virginia Woolf or Chip Delaney is likely to find a particular kind of prose pyrotechnics fun in the way a sprinter finds sprinting fun, or a powerlifter finds fun in the tense and heave. But a reader who’s come looking for the kind of fun you get from a classic 90s fantasy doorstopper with 1000 pages that can be read at the rate of a page every 10 seconds, might need a different prose style, because (as Chip Delany said of Star Wars) “the background has to be consistent and the foreground has to be fast.” This person is also looking for fun! But fun means something different in that context. Hierarchies and confirmation bias and ego defense are so baked into the human animal that these different funs often become self-protectively hierarchy-coded (“I like GOOD books, you know, like Robert Jordan, not that pretentious twisty stuff where I can’t figure out what’s going on!”), but if we can look past that we can see that a swing dance and ball and a rave are fun in different ways—and none of them will feel particularly fun if you don’t know how to have fun at them.

I could keep going but it’s time for me to go have fun. Have fun yourselves! & Work for the liberation (fun?) of all sentient beings. Talk soon.