Depression and Writing: Volume Whatever

I’m sure it will come as a shock to some people that using mindless Facebook games and terrible pop music from the mid-2000s to distract oneself from overwhelming executive dysfunction is not conducive to a life of writing. Please try to work through your surprise as I carry this discussion forward.

Every so often I make this post. The one where I point out that I’ve been posting really sporadically, and I assure everyone that I am going to start writing more often, and I promise to maintain this blog better. I even believe it.

But forming habits is even harder, I would argue, than breaking them, and when you throw depression and executive dysfunction into the mix it becomes all but impossible.

So I’d like to take a minute to discuss depression from the perspective of a writer. It’s something I’ve touched on a few times before, and I think there are a lot of misconceptions out there about it.

The pervasive one is that depression should fuel creativity. This comes, I think, from the misunderstanding that depression is never-ending negative emotion, and that emotion–especially negative emotion, for some reason–is a powerful fuel for writing.

Well, half of that is true. Emotion absolutely can be a powerful fuel for writing. The problem is, that’s not really what depression is. Depression sometimes instead makes things muted. Instead of feeling ALL the feelings, it’s like you’re feeling none of them. And sometimes it just makes you tired, lethargic, and, well, to the untrained eye, lazy.

Obviously depression is not laziness, and I don’t really want this to turn into a blog about what depression is or isn’t anyway. I’ve written enough about that.

The hardest part of when depression takes away emotion is that with that, it takes away my passion. And so I’ve fallen behind in reading. Have hardly picked up a book in about a month and a half. Haven’t read any poetry at all since January. And of course, naturally, I haven’t written a damn thing.

And it’s scary, because in those moments I start to wonder: Do I actually like writing? Do I care about the written word? Is this a thing that still really matters to me? I’ve built my identity around a love and respect for what language can do for such a long time that if I have to stop and question those things, then I have to stop and question who I really am or if I really am anyone at all.

And maybe that in and of itself could be fodder for a poem, if I felt up for it. Maybe I will soon.

This is equal parts yet another “I’m sorry I haven’t been posting, I promise I’ll try to again real soon” post AND an explanation of why posts may continue to be few and far between for a while, though I do have some things I look forward to sharing in the near future. In the meantime, I’m going to keep posting as I can and focus on taking care of myself.

If there are any other writers with depression who’d like to share your tips on how you break through it to Write a Thing (when nothing feels worth writing), please let me know!

The Importance of Reading (and a New Year’s Resolution)

So I just finished reading my 9th book of 2016.

No, that is not a typo. I really have only finished 9 books in the last 11 months and some change. Yes, I know that is a very small number. I’m as disappointed as you are.

I used to read at least 40 books a year (usually around 50). The last couple years, depression and executive dysfunction have been kicking my ass hard and my reading has dwindled. But only nine books? Single digit? It’s shaping up to be my worst reading year ever. Or, at least since learning to read.

I’ve got two more books to get through by the end of the year: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, both books I picked up and started reading and then put down to take a break and didn’t pick up again for whatever reason. Not because they’re bad books by any means–in fact I’m reading The Bell Jar for the second time because it’s an old favorite–but because executive dysfunction means not having the energy or willpower to do even things I usually would be eager for.

Now here I am trying to power through books at the end of the year to salvage some dignity as a self-proclaimed bookworm, and I’m realizing just how important reading actually is to me.

I have a sense of identity when I read. Who I am, how I act, how I write, how I talk, how I present myself, how adventurous I am, what philosophies influence me, what I think, how I think about it, how I interact with people, and how I process the world around me all change as a direct result of whether and what I’m reading. When I’m not reading? I feel like I’m not as much a person, and it kills.

When I am reading, I get my sense of identity back. My sense of identity is so closely tied to literature–and as a result of literature, and as a result of how influenced by literature I am, my personality tends to be very fluid. That fluidity is part of what I love about myself. It makes me more spontaneous, more unpredictable, more contradictory–all features I used to pride myself on back when I had a different book in my hands every week or so.

And for all that, the other thing I define myself by–my writing–is influenced in all the same ways by what I read. Which is to say that when I’m not reading, I’m not writing.

I gave a pretty solid crack at NaNoWriMo, but it burnt me out. I never came back to blog about it, because I didn’t feel like writing. And I didn’t feel like writing because I didn’t feel like reading.

I guess my point is that reading is important to writing. But it’s also important to just being a person. I learn when I read. I stay active when I read. I stay alert and curious and excited and unpredictable when I read. I like the version of me that reads books. And I like the version of me that writes, which is only possible when I read.

2017 will be an improvement in this department. My number one goal for the new year? Romanticize words like I did when I first discovered what they could do. Because they can do a whole hell of a lot, and it’s time I remembered that.

On Finding Motivation to Write

Over and over throughout my life I have found that most of my motivation to write comes from reacting to things.

I used to think writing was a thing that came from within. And in some ways, it is. Maybe for a long time, it absolutely was. Writing was what I did when there were things inside of me that needed to get out.

But more and more I find that those things inside me stay inside me until prompted. Until something outside makes me realize what’s inside, and then what’s inside spills out after whatever is out there.

Sometimes I know there’s something inside me that needs to get out, and I just don’t know how to get it out until I find some external thing that sets off the reaction.

Sometimes there’s nothing particularly eager to escape, and then I see something and all of a sudden it’s like a storm brewing out of nowhere.

But I’ve learned that for me, these days, writing is almost always reactionary. No matter what it is I’m writing about, how personal or internal it is, the process of putting it into words is a reaction–an almost involuntary one–to some external stimuli.

Now that I know that, I’m working on ways to learn to harness that brewing storm, that uncontrollable spilling of the Inside, and learn to make the internal and external work together.

All part of the process.

I’ve got a new project brewing, possibly. Stay tuned, and click here to help me in the decision making process by responding to the pinned post at the top of the page.

Being a Writer with Depression

There’s a common understanding that creativity and mental illness go hand in hand. Everyone from Van Gogh to Hemingway (and many, many others) has fallen into this category, to the point where we almost feel like the two things are normal–or at least inseparable. We sometimes doubt whether the art of these great inspirations would have happened if they had been happy.

The idea seems to be that mental illnesses such as depression are what motivate artists and writers, what give us fuel for what we do; that it is, in fact, the mental illness that makes us creative.

While many writers do use their mental illness in their writing, the above could not be further from the truth. I’ve written before about how false the idea of creating art from pain can be. More often than not, mental illness–and in my experience, depression in particular–is a hindrance to writing, for a few reasons:

1. It keeps you from feeling motivated.

Sure, you might be able to churn out a piece once in a while, when everything gets built up and you have to let it out somehow. Or maybe you churn out a lot of work, but sometimes it’s out of a sense of obligation, a feeling that you have to or you won’t be able to handle what’s going on inside.

I have never known a writer, artist, or musician with depression who feels that their illness fuels their passion in a positive way, and for many people, pursuing a passion becomes difficult and painful. What you’re left with is a mind that is both cluttered and sluggish, and a resentment toward yourself for being unable to produce what you should be able to.

2. It keeps you from feeling satisfied with your work.

One of the best things about creative output is the sense of accomplishment when you create something you’re proud of. The problem with depression is that it often hinders you from feeling that sense of accomplishment. This goes hand in hand with the above idea that often the output is less driven by motivation or ambition and more by a sense of obligation.

You HAVE to make this thing. Either because you’re supposed to despite the fact that Depression doesn’t want to, or because even if you don’t want to you know if you don’t Depression will hurt you more. Pride rarely comes hand in hand with it; it’s merely an ugly thing you had to give birth to so it didn’t eat you from the inside. And once it’s out in the world, you often still only see it as ugly.

3. You get burnt out.

Some people can work through this because they’ve got to get that shadow out of them somehow, and so the exhaustion doesn’t slow the output. But nonetheless many writers will feel exhausted. Take National Poetry Writing Month, for example–I completed it, and I’m proud.

But writing a poem a day for 30 days took so much out of me that I didn’t write again for 12 days afterwards. Nothing. No creative output. Not a blog, not a poem, not even a private journal entry. Not only did I not write, I didn’t really do much of anything else. It took me two weeks to regain the energy that creative output drained me of, even when that creative output felt necessary to purge some demon or another from myself.

The bottom line is that art is work. Art is effort, and exhaustion, and yes, beauty and reward too–but mental illness is also draining, and makes it hard to feel the positive emotions that should come from creating art.

I’ve heard people ask, would Van Gogh have put out less work if he was happy? Maybe. Maybe he wouldn’t have felt as compelled to create without having demons to exorcise. Or maybe he would have felt more inclined to create. Maybe he would have had more energy, more oomph, to keep putting even more beauty into the world.

And that’s the upside to all of this–that depression may or may not hinder art, but it is certainly not necessary to make it.

I’ve heard so many people express a fear that without their mental illness, they would not be artists. Mental illness is not the inspiration of art. It is not the thing that makes a person creative. Depression is not, contrary to popular belief, a gift of creativity. It is a very heavy burden, and one that makes passion hard to pursue.

Artists have every right to aspire to happiness. That should be encouraged more than “making art out of pain.” Because when the pain is gone, the art can still be there. It will just be different. But sometimes the pain is what keeps the art from happening.

Halfway: A NaNoWriMo Blog

For those unfamiliar, November is NaNoWriMo–National Novel Writing Month, the month in which writers everywhere call in “sick” to their obligations, stay home, and consume unhealthy amounts of coffee (or tea, or the caffeinated beverage of their choice) while frantically attempting to write 50,000 words in thirty days.

There has been a lot of criticism about NaNoWriMo, from that which focuses on the technical side of writing (50,000 words is really more of a novella than a novel) to that which focuses on the philosophy of writing (regarding whether it is ultimately helpful to focus on quantity over quality and whether NaNoWriMo encourages unhealthy or inaccurate ideals about what it means to be a novelist). These criticisms seem to resurface every year, and it always gets me thinking. Not about the technical side, because quite frankly I don’t care what you label a piece of work in terms of genre as much as I care what kind of impact it has.

Which brings us into that philosophy of writing: What kind of impact DOES it have?

Today marks the halfway point of NaNoWriMo and I know a lot of you are kind of losing steam, so I figured it’s a good time to talk about what it is we’re really doing here. (The timing of this blog might also have something to do with the fact that that I actually started it on November 4 when NaNoWriMo was fresh and your novels were just embryonic Microsoft Word files, but I ended up procrastinating because I am not as strong as those of you who actually have been writing every day this month.)

The argument that I see, over and over again, every year since I first became aware of NaNoWriMo back in 2007, is that putting quantity of words over quality inevitably produces poor writing; it is creating art for art’s sake and will inherently lack meaning; and it ultimately creates a piece of literature that will have no influence over the writer OR the reader.

I think what such critics fail to realize is that usually the first draft isn’t supposed to be influential and profound, and it’s not supposed to be a high-quality finished draft. Critics come at NaNoWriMo to argue how damaging it is to REAL writers who write EVERY DAY and AGONIZE over writing the PERFECT WORDS…forgetting that most “real writers” also write first drafts that, in all reality, are probably pretty terrible and serve the primary function of getting the story laid out on the page.

I’ve referenced it time and time again, but Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts is an inspiration to me. Why? Because it’s a reminder that, contrary to what some critics of NaNoWriMo seem to think, the author’s first draft is usually NOT the one in which they’re agonizing over which punctuation mark to use or finding the perfect word to describe that color or making a character’s speech bloom into believable poetry. The first draft is the one where they get everything on the page and it’s terrible and they hate it but they thank the good novel-writing gods for the existence of revision. John Green’s original drafts of The Fault in Our Stars was submitted to his editor with an ending that got the response of, “The last 40 pages, I can’t tell if you’re kidding.”

And THEN the revision happened. And that’s another issue that NaNoWriMo critics have–it puts the focus on writing, rather than on editing, and we all know (and this is a legitimate and true statement) that the story really happens in the editing. But the revisions would not have happened, and the heartbreaking and touching story we all know would not have happened, if it hadn’t been for that original “problematic” and “ambitious” (according to Green’s editor) work of putting the story on the page. And THAT’S what NaNoWriMo is about.

Finally, a heavy amount of criticism of NaNoWriMo declares that all participants do is write, and none of them read, making it seem like writing a novel is easy and you can do it without even having read all that many novels first. Which I will agree is just not true; but it also has never been the spirit or culture of NaNoWriMo. For one thing, very few people will claim NaNoWriMo or the overall process of writing a novel is easy. There are special places on the NaNoWriMo forums for writers who are going absolutely insane, for whom the process is eating away at their brain, or for whom the prospect of hitting that 50,000 word goal seems more like a dreaded obstacle than an exciting adventure (I’m looking at you, writers who haven’t broken 10k yet. I was there last year.) No one thinks this is easy, and while it certainly is fun and exciting, no one will argue that they have this novel writing thing all figured out now.

And furthermore, I’ve never known a NaNoWriMo participant who didn’t love to read.

That said, the two articles I’ve cited in this post have one point that I would like to emphasize, loudly and repeatedly: CELEBRATE READERS. Not only do readers fill our world with a more informed, empathetic, and well-rounded populace, but more importantly, they give our writers an audience so that they can open up a dialogue about the world they’re writing for and about. (Ending a sentence in a proposition. Take that, prescriptive grammarians.)

So, NaNoWriMo participants, keep writing. Even if you’ve only written 3,000 words this month, keep writing. And when November is over and you’ve written however many words you’ve written, your novel will not be over, so keep writing then, and keep editing. And above all else, keep reading, because that’s how you’ll make the next novel (and maybe even this one) (and certainly the world) better.

On a closing note, because so many of these critics like to tell you how NaNoWriMo is not how you write a publishable book, here’s a link to Barnes & Noble’s list of seven YA novels that started as NaNoWriMo projects. So go forth and kick some ass.

*I originally wanted to write this blog to be exactly 1,667 words long, in honor of NaNoWriMo’s daily average word count to reach 50,000, but I fell about 600 words short. And it took me almost two weeks. Just in case anyone needed a reminder of how much work this actually can be, especially for us amateur/beginning writers.

Five Tips to Get Better

I’ve thought a lot about things that have helped me improve my writing over the years. With forty-five minutes and counting on this free hour-long trial of internet that I’m on right now, I figured the fastest way to share them would be in list form. Here goes–a list of things we all can do to make us better (as writers, artists, or whatever we’re pursuing, probably).

1. Surround yourself with people who are better than you are. It can be tempting to be around people who aren’t as good as you, because then you get to look around and go, “I”m the best poet/writer/artist/musician/yodeler in this room.” Don’t do that. If you realize you feel like your skill has advanced beyond the crowd you hang out with and critique with, find people who make you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing, and learn from them.
2. Indulge in your art of choice. Indulge in it often. Indulge in it broadly. Indulge in forms of it you don’t think are for you. If you write purely historical fiction, read some sci-fi. If you only play heavy metal, try listening to some smooth jazz. Learn what magic cross-contamination of genres can be.
3. Push yourself. Hard. Don’t let yourself get complacent. Better yet, don’t even let yourself get comfortable. Write a sonnet when all you’ve ever done is free verse. Try something you’ve never done before. Fail at it. Fail at it again. Fail at it so hard you’d be embarrassed to read it to your eight-year-old cousin who thinks “The Addams Family Started/When Uncle Fester Farted” is the best poetry they’ve ever heard.
4. Study your craft, even if it makes no sense to you. Read long-winded articles and essays and make yourself understand them, even if you don’t agree with them. Expand your perspective of your craft beyond what suits your worldview. Embrace it, or push back against it. Either way, learn something new, learn something difficult, and let it affect you.
5. Write to your lowest standard. Or create to your lowest standard, if your art doesn’t happen to involve literature. Just create. Let it be terrible. Go read Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts. Then read your own shitty first draft, and make it better. Or give into what feels like the crushing pain of failure, and just accept that you wrote something awful, but know that you learned from it. Possibly about yourself, possibly about your craft, probably about both.

It’s definitely important to add here that this is not advice coming from an expert who, out of the goodness of their heart, is passing wisdom on to those less advanced. This is just coming from a person who is still learning, and has found the things that are teaching me the most.

On the Writing Process

I’m always fascinated by what people go through when cranking out a creative work—from conception of the idea all the way through the final edits. So I thought I’d touch on my own writing process.

Though my writing process isn’t so much a process, actually, as it is something like a very drunk and very out-of-shape person attempting to do parkour–kind of all over the place, full of flailing, and almost always very painful.

The way it usually starts is I end up coming up with little snippets of poems–lines, titles, or just vague ideas. And then saving them as Notepad files with incredibly helpful names such as, “Thing,” “Poem,” “Possible Title,” “Thing 2,” etc., so that I can ensure that next time I feel like editing an established project or developing an older idea I will have to flip through at least a couple dozen text files before figuring out which one is the one I wanted to work on.

When I come up with these ideas, sometimes it’s a very detailed idea and/or a rough stanza or two. When that happens, I pursue the idea as far as I can—though usually at that stage it’s not going to get farther than a couple (what I hope to be) well-thought-out lines and some filler. Sometimes it’s just a prompt or a title that I want to work with. Sometimes it’s literally just an idea–no actual lines or detailed concepts, nothing to work with other than something along the lines of “Poem about ketchup as a metaphor for death. Line about rotting tomatoes?”

Pictured above: The inevitability of oblivion dragging us from life into its inescapable clutches.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that my writing non-process is basically a giant disorganized mess and I’d like to say no one understands it but me but more often than not I don’t understand it either.

The process does start to move forward eventually though. At some point, the actual writing happens. This usually starts with me closing my eyes, mumbling words and phrases that I think might sound good, taking a few deep breaths, and just letting myself feel the poem in my body. Which sounds like a bunch of hippie dippy nonsense, but that’s kind of what it’s like. If I can feel the poem, there’s a much better chance I can write it.

Sometimes this happens with a whole new piece, but more often than not I dig through one or twelve of those files titled “Poem” or “Thing” and find one that doesn’t repulse me in that moment.

And then, when I feel like I understand the poem, I write it. With actual words. I write the words, and I delete them and write different ones. Sometimes I write words and I don’t delete them but I still write different ones. Sometimes I’ll write two or three versions of the same stanza and keep them all so that when I go back to it later I won’t remember what the hell I was trying to do.

Sometimes I structure a poem as I write it, and then completely change the structure later. Or keep I keep the structure the same. Sometimes I write it all in block form and fight with structure in an entirely different writing session. I write until it feels complete.

Not finished, mind you. Complete. It feels like it begins, continues, and ends in a way that makes sense. It might have as much poetic value as a smashed dung beetle, and I might think it doesn’t deserve to ever see the light of day, but it feels like it’s a full piece.

And then I don’t touch it for at least a week. I have to give myself enough distance that I’m not constantly reciting my favorite lines in my head to see how soon I can make myself hate them.

When I’m ready, I go back to it. Sometimes I like it as is and only make minor changes. More often I hate it and stuff it away again for a few more weeks (months, years, millennia…). Ideally, I find something worthwhile in it, so I make the necessary major edits and call it finished. Then again sometimes during the editing process the entire poem gets rewritten into something so different that it’s unrecognizable from its previous version and I have to give it a few more weeks (months, years, you get the idea) before I decide if I like it at all.

But I always try to start with finding that something worthwhile. It might be an idea that’s horribly written but could be made into something good, and that idea might become the basis for what is essentially a new poem. Sometimes it’s a couple lines with a really interesting voice and tone, and I reshape the rest of that poem to fit that voice.

What all of this means is that sometimes I end up finishing a poem in about an hour, sitting down at that first writing session with a fresh idea in mind and write it to completion and end up liking it as is, and other times it takes me an absurd amount of time, to the point where even I don’t have patience for my own abysmal failure to meet any kind of deadline.

But if, after all of that, I feel proud of what I’ve written, I post it. At that point THIS process starts:

Except that I’m finally getting better about the part where I don’t write anything for a long time in between those beautiful moments when I discover I hate everything I’ve ever written. I’m getting better at just sitting my sorry self down and writing anyway. I think that’s the best way I can measure my progress as a writer right now.

And I just hope that someone somewhere feels that what I’ve managed to struggle to write is meaningful.

And that’s it. That’s my mess of a sorry excuse for a disaster of a not really writing process.

Moral of the story: I’m starting to believe 80-90% of writers don’t actually know what the heck we’re doing. Most writers I know don’t have a plan. We just wing it. Sometimes it turns into something and sometimes it doesn’t, and when we’re very lucky, it turns into something that connects with other people. I think I’m learning to be okay with that.

If anyone has a writing process they’d like to talk about, I’d love to hear it. Especially if it’s for poetry, but I’m fascinated by the writing and editing process of all kinds of work. Feel free to share!

Writing and Recovering

I have a pretty consistent writing cycle. It looks something like this:

I know this is a pretty crudely made flowchart, but I hope you’ll forgive me–I’m a words person, not a graphics person.

Anyway, this writing cycle has been at the core of my writing habits ever since I finally learned enough about poetry to know that I was a terrible poet. (Since then I’d like to think I have evolved into at least a mediocre poet.)

I spend a lot of time thinking about the nature of being an artist in any medium. Whether it’s music, poetry, novels, sculpture, painting, digital art, or any number of other forms of creative media, almost everyone I know who knows a damn thing about their craft hates almost everything they create.

I don’t really know what to make of this, other than to say that there is a strange comfort in knowing that. For a very long time I was sure that if I understood poetry, and I disliked my own poetry, that could only mean that I was making a correct educated opinion of my poetry when I told myself my poetry was awful. Then I saw a quote of Neil Gaiman’s on his Tumblr, answering an ask about how he handles feeling discouraged and saying that he initially responds to the feeling by “announcing gloomily that I can no longer write, have never been any good at it, and anything I’ve managed to do so far in the writing business was probably just sheer blind luck anyway.”

That was pretty much the moment I decided Neil Gaiman was my literary role model. I could probably write a whole post about that–perhaps I will later. But that’s beside the point.

The point is, that was also the moment where I started to accept that being self-conscious about my writing did not mean my writing was bad. It was the moment I realized that people who know what they’re doing, people who are good at it and successful at it and write things that millions of people love, still look at what they’ve written sometimes and think, “I’m hopeless.”

And that has honestly been one of the most powerful things I have learned in all the years I’ve been writing. At least some degree of self-loathing seem to be an inherent part of being an artist, but it does not invalidate the meaning of art.

The best thing I’ve ever had happen to me is when I did an impromptu poetry reading. It was at a friend’s house show–he had a bunch of loud punk rock artists come and play music. When I joked that the only thing I could contribute was poetry, which was a little at odds with what seemed to be the current theme, a handful of people there–including hardcore punk rockers who screamed their lyrics and said “fuck” every other word–told me I should do it. So I did.

And afterwards a few of those people, people I had no idea had ever shared any of my struggles, all came up to me to tell me how much they felt what I had said.

I still look at the pieces I performed and tell myself they’re garbage. But ultimately, they resonated with someone, didn’t they? Whatever I thought of them, they meant something, and they meant something even to someone who wasn’t me, someone who probably didn’t know I connected with their struggles any more than I knew they connected with mine. I think that’s a pretty amazing thing, and ultimately, what validates art–far more than the artists own, quite possibly slanted opinion.