[Writing] Writing with Depression (aka: Why My Books Aren't Finished)

After Scott Lynch (author of The Gentleman Bastard sequence) posted about depression earlier this week over on his Live Journal, I thought it was a good opportunity to describe how depression affects an aspiring writer’s life and work. Mainly the work.

I’m twenty-something, I’ve studied for degrees at Bachelor and Masters levels, and I’m also writing a trilogy. Or would be...if I wasn’t still stalling on the first book. I say “stalling”: this doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s in the book—hell, I know what’s in the trilogy and the trilogy after that, and so on and so forth. Basically, it’s not that I don’t know what to, or how to write, on the contrary. I know precisely how to do both, and I get irked if I don’t manage to write in a day.

I am a writer; if I do not write, I start to develop sociopathic tendencies. Alright, that last part was an exaggeration. Either way, I get very, very cranky if my mood prevents me from writing.

And here’s where we get to the “mood” part.

I am depressed. It’s lot better than it was when studying for my MA, when I essentially took up the role of a well-dressed zombie, shambling about the house daily, hardly doing anything but staring meaningfully at an open blank page, almost hoping my novels would just splurge themselves onto the awaiting spaces. In fact, I tried this for two years, whilst plodding along with my postgraduate studies, working on trite nonsense dressing itself up as science-fiction, but in plain enough clothes to pass as “normal fiction” for the genre-hating lecturers at my university.

I got precious little done, in the end. Oh, I might have gotten a Masters Degree, but who’s counting that? Certainly not me.

Now?

Things are better.

Marginally.

 I don’t think depression ever goes away, I merely think we learn how to cope with it. Coping mechanisms are what enable us to actually plod the hell on, and take a moment and think “right, I’m sitting here like a zombie; I’m frustrated and upset—oh! It’s a blip, that’s what it is”.

Unsurprisingly—yet it took me some time to actually realise it—my mechanism is reading. I’ve been reading fantasy for years, however, it’s only in the last two years I have been eating books. I’ve found that when I read, I can write, and when I can write; I’m happier (happy, some days).

It seemed as good a time as any to blog about this, because I really am getting better: it’s not as hard as it used to be, and once you identify triggers and the pitfalls of your own moods, you can begin to overcome the depression on a level you previously never could. So, I can pretty much understand everything Lynch talks about in his blog. Not all depression is the same, but, I think we can at least understand each other a little.

Depression is the single reason I am plodding through The White War; the first book in my trilogy. (Well, that and the reasons discussed in a previous post.) It’s coming along, now, and the whole series is planned out: everything is merely waiting to be written. It’s frustrating, really, that my head and plans are so far ahead of my fingers on the keyboard. 

Frustrating as it is, there’s little point in forcing or rushing things: it’ll merely disrupt whatever progress I’ve made through my depression. So, instead, you have to work day-to-day. It’s awkwardly annoying for a control freak like me, but, it’s all I have. (And it appears to be working.)

In essence, I’ve given myself a very harsh deadline for The White War: I won’t say when it is, but, by hook or by crook, it will be done by this date. Then I have the joy of beginning on The Black Rebellion. Being a writer is fun, isn’t it?

I’m hoping for a productive summer; I’m hoping to make a lot of progress both with my writing, and with my depression.

And one can but hope.