Why So Serious?
- Wenshu Wang
- Jun 26
- 4 min read
Wenshu Wang asks questions about how to subvert the typical rules of writing, and shows how breaking the coda of art-making ultimately results in a more interesting final product.
Foreword:
Wenshu's article, upon a first read, reminded me a lot of another essay I love, from the Center for Fiction, "Something to Do with Work as Play", which revolves around another essay I love, "The Nature of the Fun", by David Foster Wallace. In my brain, it's essays all the way down. To summarize briefly, (though I recommend getting a hard look at each) all three writers deal with the nature of writing as a kind of fun, ultimately- without begetting questions of how writing can act as a method of cultural preservation or representation or its burgeoning importance in a society long-hounded by the shadow of functional illiteracy. Yes, these essays say, all these questions are important, but none of us came into the game, as children or impressionable teens, with these questions in mind. Art, after all, is an experience meant primarily to be enjoyed. It's why I keep returning to this idea of a metaphorical purity as a writer on this site- because I think to out-think yourself out of finding enjoyment in anything undertaken for love of the game, but especially writing, is to derive yourself of the whole point. This website, though it may seem difficult to believe, is to encourage writers to have fun. The strange, twisted, words-as-everything fun that only people who are strange enough to be writers can have. Sometimes writing is the point. Sometimes having fun is the entire point.
Writing didn’t begin as a product. It began as a need: a way to name, to notice, to remember. However, somewhere between the blank page and the workshop rubric, it became a performance. Every sentence is expected to prove something. Every metaphor must shine. Every idea must arrive fully formed, annotated, and justified. With the rise in hyper-competitive programs, publication pressure, and the branding of teenage brilliance, we're told—explicitly or not—to write like our futures depend on it, not to experiment, but to impress.
In this climate, however, the joy, the risk, the chaos of writing disappears.
Here’s the truth: perfection is not the mark of a real writer. Pressure is not the source of good work. And seriousness, for all its posture, is not the same thing as depth. Writing, to be alive, cannot be a performance nor a contest of polish, and certainly not some carefully curated display case for your intellect. To borrow from Barthes, “to try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.” All real writing enters that territory. It risks disorder. Writing, at its core, is contact: between writer and world, between idea and feeling, between attention and form. And contact is rarely clean. In fact, much of what makes writing compelling emerges not from perfection, but from imperfection that has been honestly engaged.
So, what does that mean in practice? It means letting go of some ideas that are doing more harm than good:
1. Stop mistaking complexity for quality. Dense language does not equal good writing: precision does. If you can say something simply and it still hits hard, you’re doing it right.
2. Accept the value of failure. First drafts are supposed to falter. If you’re waiting until the idea is flawless, you’ll never write it. Draft badly, then revise with intent.
3. Write what disturbs your stillness, Not what will be praised. Not what checks the right boxes. Start with what won’t leave you alone. That’s where the energy is.
4. Understand the rules, but don’t be ruled by them. Grammar is a tool, not a cage. Form is a framework, not a moral code. Let your language serve the piece— not the other way around.
5. Cut what is performative. If a paragraph exists to make you sound intelligent but says nothing true— cut it. If it’s clever but empty— cut it. Writing that matters never flatters the ego.
6. Read your work aloud. Your voice has rhythm, cadence, breath. Use it. Good writing moves like speech under pressure.
7. Let humor, contradiction, and mess exist. Clean writing is not always honest writing. Let there be awkwardness. Let there be friction. Don’t edit out everything human in pursuit of something sterile.
8. Prioritize impact over image.You don’t need to prove you’re smart. Really, what matters is that you can say something that matters— to you, first, and maybe to someone else too.
Here’s what most people won’t say: a lot of “perfect” writing is lifeless. It’s rehearsed, overpolished, safe. And the safest writing rarely reaches anyone. What stays with a reader is what moves, even if it’s flawed, uneven, strange. Be willing to risk the draft that doesn’t work in order to find the one that does.
So, if your writing is messy, tangled, contradictory—good. That means there’s something alive in it. Keep going.
Additional Resources:
David Foster Wallace: “The Nature of the Fun”. Retrieved from Purdue University, Department of Computer Science (web.ics.purdue.edu).
Kristopher Jansma: "Something to Do with Work as Play: David Foster Wallace and 'The Nature of the Fun'." Retrieved from The Center for Fiction.
