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There are a lot of reasons why people write, and sometimes the intersection between taking your hobby seriously and your mental health can intersect. These are various issues / questions I’ve come across, but I’m putting them all in one place, with a dash of knowledge based on my background as a psychologist.
I’m struggling with depression or OCD—can I step back from querying?
For the love of god yes. I’ve been through the wringer on a variety of different writing related issues, but querying objectively is the worst. I queried three different books and rejection after rejection—or not even getting a rejection!—can really take its toll on you. Yes, rejection hurts virtually everyone who cares about their work, but there is something unique about being in a depressed mindstate. The depressed mind is weighed down by stuff in a way that the un-depressed mind isn’t. You are more likely to be irritable, more easily annoyed. (This isn’t a criticism— it’s a fact and something I’ve experienced myself.) It is almost as if the depressed mind is looking for pieces of evidence to call itself a worthless piece of garbage. Engaging in an activity that revolves around a rejection rate of about 99% might not be the best thing to do if you’re really struggling right now. Give yourself permission to step back. You might feel pressure to NOT step back because everyone ELSE is rushing forward with their books and they’re going to get agents and book deals and you will be left behind… Thing is, you need to concentrate on yourself.
I’m so subsumed with feelings of worthlessness/ perfectionism/ jealousy that even though I want to write, I find that I can’t.
One of the things you encounter a lot when you are a published writer is meeting people who, after you tell them you have a book out, they will say wistfully, “I always wanted to write a book.” But like… anyone can. Anyone can write a book—it doesn’t have to be good. You just have to type 50-90k words. But why don’t people write when they want to? Putting aside the wistful person who never took up the pen, there are writers who used to write, but then stopped, something paralyzing them. Maybe a major negative life event, maybe something super positive happening to a writer friend of theirs.
I would like to say two cheesy things—even though they are cheesy, they are really really true and I think about them a lot. One is Wayne Gretsky saying that you miss 100% of the shots you never take. You have to take a lot of shots to get even one goal, and an insane, wild amount of shots to get to the point of Wayne Gretsky. The other cheesy thing is: perfectionism is the enemy of good. If you are so paralyzed at your writing desk that the thought of writing anything stupid prevents you from writing anything at all… Yes, never writing means that 100% of your stuff won’t suck because it won’t exist.
If you find yourself in this paralyzed state, this is my recommendation:
Sit down and make a list of the most awful, stupid things you can think of. Here’s a hodgepodge of mine: I hate stories were a precocious little kid says profound things, I think it is so stupid when scientists in a movie are talking to each other like, “DNA? Deoxyribonucleic acid? The genetic building block of human life?” I hate stories about chosen one girls in high school who are SO not athletic but when they get sent to magic school SUDDENLY they are better than everyone else. Take that list of stupid things and set out to write the stupidest, worst written thing that has ever existed. The entire point of this exercise is to win the “Worst written” award. Set yourself free from trying to be good by being as bad as possible. HAVE FUN.
The thing about suffering from writing paralysis is that you’ve forgotten that you used to find writing fun. There are a lot of reasons for this…
I used to think writing was fun, but now I’m just anxious all the time about getting an agent/ being on sub/ selling enough copies / getting good reviews / making enough money.
This is the problem when you go from “writing was a thing I did for fun” to mixing art and commerce. It isn’t just about money though. I haven’t really thought about it, but if you asked me, “Why did you seek out publication?” several years ago, my answer would not be, “Money.” I initially sought out publication with short stories in literary magazines—there’s laughably little money to be had there. I think I was doing it for recognition. I wanted some validation—someone to say, “This is good enough to be published.” I will always be, at some level, an Asian kid who doesn’t think I’m good if I’m not pulling in As and trophies. And now that I’m middle aged, there are no grades or trophies—just book sales and award nominations and instagram likes.
It’s hard once you cross over from the “I’m purely doing this for fun” into the “yeah this is fun.. but maybe I can sell this?” territory. Because you have to have that external validation to continue, and it might not come. If your self esteem is reliant on that external validation, it’s rough going. Good books get turned down sometimes, and bad books get published. It’s not exactly a meritocracy.
How DO you recover that sense of fun-ness? I don’t entirely have an answer, but I guess I would say this: try to compartmentalize time/ space to separate the art and commerce parts of yourself. Today, for example, I set aside 4 hours to work on writing stuff. If I’m doing a half hour or hour long block to work on actual drafting, that is all I work on during that time. I might spend a later block of time of half an hour or an hour to do what I think of as “admin” stuff—corresponding with my agent, researching some stuff about sales or marketing. When you are getting into your grove about writing your characters having a fight, you should be thinking about the fight, not about whether or not an agent will like it. That’s when you have to turn off your “critical or bad audience” button and turn on your “what would the people who love this kind of shit think about this part” button. The best writing, I think, is when you can tell the author is having fun at some level.
Is writing therapy?
No. Writing can be therapeutic but it isn’t always. There’s been some consistent research that shows that expressive writing has short and long term benefits, but not all writing is like expressive writing. (In expressive writing, you sit down for 15 minutes at a minimum, and with no breaks write constantly about what you feel and why. You don’t think about whether or not it is good, you don’t intend to show it to anyone, you’re basically just exorcising it.) This type of writing or journaling is great, but doesn’t take the place of seeking professional help.
This type of writing can be particularly useful to people who struggle to articulate their own feelings. I don’t want to be gendered, but I’ve encountered this the most with heterosexual men: they sometimes struggle to even identify the words for what it is that they are feeling, which I think can also make it difficult to describe why exactly one feels that way, and what other thoughts it brings up. Being forced to do this can exercise this muscle and build it up.
This is where this can get kind of sticky: perhaps the process of writing your book or story was therapeutic for you. But once you enter the world of commerce, you might be bringing the hells down upon you if your story is fundamentally about your trauma. This is to say, if you’ve written about your own rape in a fictionalized story, and you publish it, readers may send you reviews (unsolicited) where they talk about how the main character is an idiot who deserved it. If you write fiction or nonfiction about your son’s suicide, people are going to be talking about your son’s suicide and whether or not it is your fault. In short, even if you approach the topic with tenderness because of your own sensitivities, be aware that the broader world might not response with equal tenderness.
My fiction is autofiction but I don’t want people to know it is actually about me.
Then don’t call it autofiction.
Should I disclose my mental illness to my agent/ editor/ whoever?
This is a tough one and I think you will get different answers depending on who you ask and even people reading this may disagree. I feel no more need to tell someone I know professionally about mental health struggles than I do the need to tell them about the status of my ulcerative colitis. (update: I’ve been symptom free for years!) Like, why. When it might matter is if you are writing a book say, about someone with OCD, and your real lived experience is in the book. Or if the agent is seeking more authors who identify as neurodivergent. I personally don’t think it is relevant unless if affects your actual work. For example, a lot of writers had to go to their editors during COVID and explain that they just couldn’t hit deadlines. This is reasonable. I gave people a heads up that I was dealing with a lot of really stressful home life stuff because it would affect how fast I can get things done. If you have ADD and it makes it really hard to keep track of things if you get a lot of disparate messages, you can request that things come to you with a particular organization (like, for example, you’d prefer to have an edit letter first and have a couple days to go over it before you have a phone call about it.) I do urge some caution about disclosure: an agent, editor, publicist, whatever, is a business partner. It might feel squishy, but it’s a business relationship. If you disclose, there could be some risk of it backfiring on you. You have to use your judgement. Don’t assume that just because an agent is seeking submissions from neurodivergent people that they couldn’t conceivably end up being an asshole a year from now, when you are struggling with edits and they end up blaming it on your diagnoses and dropping you because you “can’t” do it. Even though agents are seeking particular types of people, I still think you should use some caution about disclosing in general: wait till you know them well enough to trust them.
But how can I write when everything is going to hell right now?
Maybe sitting at your desk writing about horny fairies falling in love with each other seems astoundingly unimportant: there are wars going on, an election coming up, environmental disaster, spiraling health care costs, I could go on. I’ve touched on this a little elsewhere (link)
but here’s the thing: everything going to hell right now is exactly why you should be writing. Maybe it’s to bring yourself an escape. Maybe it’s to bring your readers an escape. Maybe it’s to make someone smile when they were having a really awful day. Making art when the world is telling you it’s not worth making is exactly why we should do it. It’s an act of rebellion, an act of humanity, a way of saying, I’m not taking this lying down, and what you’re writing doesn’t have to be “important.” No one gets to say what is or isn’t important. Least of all the demon sitting on your shoulder telling you not to bother.
Photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash
Querying IS objectively the worst.
Loved this: “…everything going to hell right now is exactly why you should be writing.” Deserves a spot on the cork board of inspiring quotes I *should* have above my desk.