“Playing around” with our writing can be better understood by thinking of the process of giving ourselves freedom to experiment.
It’s not so much an admonishment to not take our writing seriously, because indeed we must be serious if we are to produce a piece of value to a reader, but more about temporarily removing the pressure of perfection.
Open a new Word doc (or Scrivener file, or whatever you use for drafting), copy/paste your trouble section, and rewrite it with a new style, structure, point of view, phrasing—anything different from its original form that makes sense in context.
Playing with your writing in a separate corner of the sand box means you won’t lose your original version (that one is for sure from experience) and your brain understands it as something new.
For example, one way in which I played with the narrative of my late husband’s final hour, an immensely difficult and painful thing to write, was to cast a portion of what happened as a stage production.
I drafted the scene out by character dialogue, with props and setting as stage directions.
This made sense, given the weirdly removed, out-of-body experience I’d had at the time.
I don’t write dramatic scripts, so the process allowed me to find the event’s truth through “playing with” genre.
