In which Our Hero finally plays the writing game, not merely performs the genre.
Yesterday’s post set a record in responses. So I found myself asking:
Why did people like it?
If we assume it wasn’t merely well-written form, it likely was one of these three traits:
- I wrote about two games I know extremely well. (I played poker as a method of money-making previously, in the pre-solver Jurassic period.)
- I compared two activities everyone recognizes, even if only through cultural osmosis. (Everyone knows what a clown is. Everyone knows what poker looks like.)
- I accidentally wandered into a space my sister claims is my superpower: the philosophy of games.
Two months ago she called to tell me I had a gift.
She’d asked for help diagnosing an unspoken social game at her workplace, and when I broke it down for her, she said:
- “You could be the expert at this. Not ‘an’ expert — the expert.”
For clarity: philosophy of games ≠ game theory.
I’m not a game theorist and have no ambition to become one. (Though one of my closest friends is probably top hundred in the world at the practical application of game theory.)
Instead, I love:
- games
- what games do to people
- how humans use games
- the mechanics and sub-mechanics inside games
- the social physics that games create
- the playing of games
- fun
This has always been true. As a kid, I invented strategies in schoolyard games so effective that fellow students rewrote the rules the next day. As an adult, I earned second place in the Hoboken Open pickleball tournament, which is exactly as prestigious as it sounds. In college I studied philosophy to understand the rules of our life’s game (hint: start with Aristotle).
But here’s the truth:
Yesterday’s writing, to me, felt bland.
I haven’t been having many fresh clowning insights.
I’m on break from clown school because of a broken foot.
I haven’t been around many clowns — except myself.
So instead of writing about clowning, I jotted down what I thought were painfully obvious observations.
And two people found them profound.
Compelling.
Insightful.
Why?
Clowning offers two simple rules:
- give the audience what they want, and
- follow the fun.
One mistake people make is assuming “what they want” means “repeat the product.”
But that’s not it — at least not entirely.
If I reposted yesterday’s essay verbatim, nobody would care.
This exaggerated example makes the point:
The audience doesn’t want the same product.
They want the same emotional experience.
The same arc.
The same sense of discovery.
The same journey.
Maybe one reader liked my emotional growth.
Maybe another liked the simple clarity around two games they’d only ever observed from the outside.
Maybe someone else just enjoyed seeing me think.
Writers know this:
readers fall in love not with the thing but with the transformation.
Van Gogh didn’t sell paintings until his letters were published.
Until people could see his suffering.
Until his bed wasn’t just a bed but the first possession of a poor, unraveling man.
Stories create meaning.
Meaning creates attachment.
And that’s why
Starting today, I’m going to include writing about hormones.
Yesterday I talked for an hour with my parents about my four-year experience taking œstrogen.
It was medical, emotional, biological, and sociopolitical.
It reshaped my values, which reshaped the games I chose to play.
It rewired my physical and emotional landscape.
It altered my comfort with strangers, my sense of risk, and my appetite for play.
I was on œstrogen when I decided to go to clown school.
I was back on my natural testosterone when I actually started the school year.
That contrast was… intense.
My desire to play poker changed with my hormonal profile.
My social ease changed too.
On œstrogen, my fluency with strangers soared: top decile of my life.
Now that the ease has dropped, I’m having to relearn it.
And with that comes fear.
Not melodramatic fear. More like the fear of an aging driver noticing their reaction time isn’t what it used to be:
- “I used to be good at this. What if I’m not anymore?”
But here’s the secret about fear:
It’s freezing.
But it’s also your friend.
If you don’t embrace it and step through it,
You’ll always be under its power.
This was as true yesterday — staring down an A6s decision on a 4-6-7-A-K board facing a river jam — as it is about my long hesitation to share my hormonal story.
In that hand, I should have called.
In this life, I should speak.
Not because you’re entitled to know. You’re not.
None of this is “your business.”
But I chose to be a writer.
Which makes it my business.
Said differently:
I chose this writing game.
Time to stop playing it like a wimp.
Julian Wise 