How I Started Writing Again

been able to function without creating and the misery of those years when I couldn't produce anything at all? But that already sounds so depressing. Nah, let’s go with that super-swift summary instead.

     Here, thus, are the most recent two years of my life in extreme fast-forward: having worked incredibly hard at one workplace for nine years, going above and beyond when any opportunity presented itself, taking on any shift offered, kissing ass and doing every second of overtime I could get my hands on with the goal of being able to relax and just do my job and only my job for the first time ever because I had been promised a full-time contract when a colleague left, a new boss replaced mine and strung me along about that for ten months and then told me that I would not be getting the full time contract. Completely within her rights – completely devastating for myself and my family. I was working with a temporary full-time contract at the time, and would have nine months to find another way to keep my income at a survivable level when that ran out. Spent those nine months working overtime and looking for another job.

     Bear in mind that I had been working all this time above my limits because thanks to the preceding decades of hard manual labor I have four spinal hernias, arthritis in my neck, back, feet, and hands, smashed-up knees, plantar fasciitis, an autoimmune intestinal problem that means I can’t take NSAID’s for all the pain, RSI, eczema, and a lifelong cycle of exhaustion, joint pain, headaches, and so on which has only recently been glossed by a rheumatologist into the catch-all term “fibromyalgia”. Furthermore, there are in my life a significant number of stressful situations such as ailing family and close friends with serious problems. In short, suddenly working a 50-hour week and using my every free second to look for another job meant I got to discover this horrifying new land of full-blown burnout. I've spent the 1.5 years I’ve been trying to recover from these events living on the salary I fought so hard to avoid, fighting tooth and nail first with that boss (subsequently fired, but too late for me) and now with a health system which for some reason seems to think that having the same symptoms for a long period of time is the same as recovery. It is what it is. To say that I’m angry that the actions of one single person, touching down briefly in my life and flitting away again unscathed, could completely destroy a decade of hard work, yanking the dream of stability out from under me like a party trick, would be a massive understatement.

     Whatever.

     Needless to say, somewhere in there my creative abilities ebbed. Not just the writing. All the things I use to keep myself sane were dying. I couldn't write fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, I couldn’t paint or draw, I covered my work notebooks with monotonous, uninspired, depressingly uniform doodles. I couldn’t break the rut. Eventually, long before my eventual total breakdown, I couldn’t even read. My life, before the burnout, had become a trudging, unvaried slog through caring for my kid, commuting (sitting blankly on the train, staring into the void, trying to find a way to think), working, searching for work. My motto had once been “I can build us a better future”, but for years now it had simply been the words of Boxer the horse: “I will work harder”. Now it had become, “Happiness is irrelevant”. From this I took strength despite its intrinsic irrationality: what I meant by it was that my happiness was irrelevant; the happiness of my family was paramount, and I would and will go to any effort to ensure that my friends find joy. Obviously I was in a bad way and using a very bad model, an unsustainable fantasy model, but we rarely see the cages we build from within them – until we try to get back out.

     When the burnout hit I had, thus, been in a rut for a very long time. In the first months of this new way of being I could do nothing. I sat. Sometimes I would remember to turn on the television, but my tolerance for crap was at an all-time low so I just put on the same few good things over and over: Rick and Morty, Ash vs Evil Dead, the Lord of the Rings movies, Deadpool. I could not read, which pained me terribly. I could barely eat. I couldn’t sleep. Those worst days did pass, though, but were replaced by little good. I became able to read again, which saved my soul more than a little, but I couldn't create, and was unable to work. Even now a year and a half later it’s a magnificent day if I can walk a little, run an errand, straighten up the living room. I’ve never been this far down before and I don’t like it here.

     I was aware of the rut, of course. I would sit in front of my computer and tell myself, “Do something!” but a war would begin inside me: all my life, literally all my life, I have tried to find a way to earn money using my creative abilities, but that has never, ever, ever worked (believe me, there will be posts about all the things I’ve tried). Therefore, said my depressed and barely-functioning neurostructure, it would be useless to do something creative. It would be a waste of time. All it would do would help distract me from the important things like finding a way to make us any money at all so we can maybe stop being so scared all the time. Yes, yes, I know this was a further sign of a clinical problem; was, in short, just another symptom. But it is what it is, and it elegantly killed any creative impulse that dared try to raise its head above the mire. So I would sit here, staring at the machine, and think about how I was in no condition (still amn’t) to, and furthermore was under medical orders NOT to, look for work. Even if I had been in such a state as to make that possible I wouldn’t have been able to take or do any job I found; I’m sick. And thus it was that at the end of every day, I would realize that in my attempts to find something “productive” to do, I had in fact done nothing. And that right there, folks is what a truly profound rut looks like. And the guilt! Oh my god, the guilt at being a strong, creative, intelligent person sitting here failing to do anything at all while my family needed me! And the guilt at being so unkind to myself as to feel the other guilt in the first place… Ah, folks, I sure was in a spiral.

     I probably would have eventually found a way to pull myself out of it. Even though I couldn’t see it, I was healing, after all, however slowly. Still am, at a glacial pace that frustrates me to no end. I do doubt that it would have happened anytime soon, though. Sometimes, you see, what we need is an outside force, something seemingly inconsequential that rolls into our lives and glances off us like two pool balls meeting on the green, and suddenly we’re looking in another direction. Looking, perhaps, at a tool. Because sometimes what we need is a bit of a… push.

     My high-schooler came home one day talking about a show they’d watched at school. This guy, I was informed, had decided to do an experiment: could he get some random person to willingly, deliberately murder someone else? It’s a great show, you really should check it out. The fellow who made it, Derren Brown, appeared thus on my radar. He’s a man of many skills who eventually bored himself silly with using his amazing talents only to wow and bedazzle his fellow man with what were essentially truly mind-blowing party tricks. Deciding to go deeper, he became an explorer of the human condition, embracing a drive to help people improve, or at least explore, themselves. Another program of his, “Sacrifice”, is the one that changed my life.

     I won’t recap the show for you; you can and should just see it yourself. Watching it, I understood what he was doing, saw that he was enabling people to instill new patterns in themselves if they chose to. Darned if that wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I needed.

     In that program there is use made of an app. A specific sound would play and the subject would respond to it by feeling endowed with certain capacities. Watching the interplay of placebo and self-hypnosis, reaction turning to action over time, I started thinking to myself, “I can do that!” and I formulated a plan. I scoured the web for an app, not having the knowledge to create my own, which would generate a notification, crucially, utterly at random. See, the key here is something a friend of mine said that really stuck with me. Sometimes someone manages to say something just when you’re most ready to really hear it. This friend writes scripts for a living, and someone asked him one time, “How do you keep yourself motivated?”      Everyone creative knows that motivation is that most precious of resources. Without it, everything seems pointless, difficult, exhausting. Impossible. The question this random person asked my friend is one of the most common posed to anyone working in the arts or athletics, the sciences, education, what have you.

     You know what my friend said? He said, “I don’t. You can’t. It doesn’t work that way. When motivation fails, you have to invoke discipline.”

     There it is: discipline. The key, and something which I have often had enormous amounts of but was now lacking in spades. And that’s what my app was for.

     I set that app to tell me at completely random intervals to write one hundred words. Facebook posts didn’t count, nor personal correspondence nor to-do lists; only truly creative efforts need apply. I figured, one hundred words? Anyone can write one hundred words. Good starting point. The discipline part was that every time that app went off, no matter what I was doing, I would drop everything and write those words. No matter what they were. I hoped that eventually, the discipline of responding to the app would start making me feel motivated when I heard that sound. At first, I did notes for the novel I’ve been “working on” – I created the rough draft the one time I did the NaNoWriMo challenge, I think four years ago now, and it had been sitting idle forever. When I wasn’t feeling creative, which at first was all the time, I would write dry descriptions of alien wildlife, character notes, snippets of random dialogue.

     How did this work out for me? Folks, it snowballed. Within two days I was writing three or four hundred words each time, and finding myself driven to pick up the thread even without the app’s sudden delivery of the sound of an oscillation overthruster in action. At the end of a week I would find myself still writing when the app went off, and a week later I shut it off and cast about for a new personal discipline target. This presented itself more or less immediately when I chanced upon a reference to the great Terry Pratchett’s own marker of 1,000 words per day. That sounded just the thing and I adopted it immediately. I must say, some weeks on, that it’s an absolutely excellent number. When I’m motivated, on a roll, getting down to business, going to town, I tend to exceed it wildly, doing 3,000 or more words at a sitting. However, when I don’t have the faintest idea what I want to write about, when the fiction seems drab and uninspired and the nonfiction dull or pretentious, when motivation is out to lunch – 1,000 words is a lot of words. I mean a lot of words to pull squirming one by one out of my brain.

     Now, when I say this snowballed, I do mean snowballed. I see from my notes that I turned the app on two months ago tomorrow. In that two months I have written this entire autobioblog, turned an old 2,500-word trunk story into a vastly improved 18,000-word novella and submitted it to a major science fiction journal and received excellent personal feedback on why it didn’t grab the editor, written several pages of a new story about an intelligent slime-mold, generated dozens of pages of structural notes for the novel, and experienced a personal creative renaissance. By that I mean that the breaking down of the detritus and filth clogging my creative outlets has not restricted itself to writing.