The Writer's Curse (part two)

Many great writers have struggled with depression yet produced brilliant work while under the influence of the black dog.

Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Chandler, Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut… all have attempted suicide due to their depression, some successfully.  And it’s not only well known authors. Many a struggling writer has died by their own hand, unpublished and unfulfilled.

Most writers have a negative internal monologue, a little voice inside their heads telling them that their work is no good and they’ll never be more than a hobby writer, if that. That pretty much comes with the territory, but for some it’s so much more than an occasional niggling voice. For many it’s a constant battle, day after day, year after year. Artists, more than most occupations, have to achieve some form of approval for their work and rejection can cut deeply. That’s before we consider that an artist who doesn’t sell is an artist who doesn’t eat. No pressure there then.

It may only be based on anecdotal evidence but it certainly appears that writers and other artists are more susceptible to depression than the average man in the street. But why? Why would someone who obviously possesses such a fertile imagination be more likely to suffer this crippling illness? Perhaps it’s because of that overdriven imagination itself, feeding the fears that the worst that could happen might come true.

Maybe it’s because writing is such a solitary pursuit, providing the author with little chance to socialise in their working hours. I’ve said before in this blog that I’ve surprised myself since becoming a full-time writer by going for three or four days at a time without speaking to anyone apart from my long-suffering Beloved. The lack of exercise and natural light in our normal working routine doesn’t help either. And of course poets and fiction writers regularly open up their souls to be inspected by others as part of their job. We all have to suffer for our art but if you pick at an emotional scab then you can’t be surprised when it remains raw and sore.

Maybe it’s karma? Maybe if you have a talent in imagination then you have to pay for it emotionally, in the same way that Stephen Hawking has phenomenal intellect yet is physically so afflicted?

But could it be that they (or should I say we, as I’ve suffered my share of black days too) aren’t statistically any more prone to depression than the rest of the population? Maybe artists just show it more? Perhaps we should look at it from a different angle. Rather than thinking of the writer as being depressed, maybe the depression brings out the writer in some people? Pain has always been a powerful catalyst for art. Perhaps, as some medics have recently suggested, depression could be good for us.

Maybe it’s time to pat the black dog on the head and say, ‘Good boy’?

© Shaun Finnie 2013

The Writer's Curse (part one)

Many great writers have struggled with alcoholism yet produced brilliant work while under the influence of the demon drink.

Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allan Poe, Norman Mailer, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Kingsley Amis, F. Scott Fitzgerald… the list goes on and on and will continue to grow as long as there are ideas to be transferred and relatively cheap alcohol on tap. And it’s not only well known authors. Many a struggling writer has died, unpublished and unfulfilled yet addicted to alcohol.

But why? Why would someone who obviously possessed such a fertile imagination feel the need to dull it with a beer buzz? While I don’t drink currently (thanks for that, Doctor) I've certainly had my fair share of falling down moments in the past. It’s made me many things such as funny, idiotic, ill, maudlin, confrontational and embarrassing but one thing that drinking too much has never made me is more creative. There is no way that I could write anything of any quality after a few beers. My thoughts become too fleeting and random, and I become very repetitive.  Probably most importantly my handwriting is pretty bad at the best of times; when I’m drunk it becomes totally illegible even to me.

I understand the euphoria and loosening of inhibitions that comes with a good slug of a good Scotch. I understand the numbing of physical or emotional pain that it supplies. I even understand that a gallon of Dutch chemically-tasting lager might silence the voices in our heads for a wee while, those non-stop gibbering monkeys who constantly scream new ideas coated with promises about how they’re so much better than the crap that I’m working on at the moment. I understand all that. But what I don’t understand is how it helps the creative process one tiny bit.

Maybe I’m just too uptight and straight-laced, and need to learn to relax a little?

Or maybe I just need a drink?

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Out of Office

They’re always there.

Among the groups of foreign students spread out across multiple tables, arguing loudly, huddled in loving couples, their feet on the furniture in a way that no self-respecting 1960’s mother would tolerate at home, let alone in a public place;

Among the business suits, tie-less to reflect the relaxed atmosphere of their off-site meeting, juniors giddy as school kids let out early for the day, jaded middle-aged middle-managers slumped beneath the weight of seen-it-all-before experience;

Among the yummy mummies sharing one naughty treat between three while comparing infant progress, buggy performance and horror stories in their one blissful hour a week that they get to talk to another adult who just might possibly understand;

They’re always there.

The scribblers and the tappers, the silent observers, the poets and the novelists whose claims to these titles are tenuous at best, laughable at the other extreme. Most of their work will never see the light of day except maybe via the murky semi-legitimate routes of self-publishing, vanity press or the instant obscurity of website blogs.

The coffee shop is their oasis, a break from the endless lonely hours connected to a home-office keyboard. The rental price of a coffee every ninety minutes or so is a bargain for the use of two square metres of prime city centre retail unit.

It can work. Ernest Hemingway, J.K. Rowling, Dostoevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hans Christian Andersen, Franz Kafka; all were known to write in coffee houses or cafés. Those who chose this route now are in illustrious company indeed. But most who make their marks on paper or screen in public places will see their writing suffer the worst fate that any written word can. It will remain unread and ignored.

As for me? I’ve been here a while. I need another venti mocha.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Write and Write Again

I’m just about to start the third draft of my novel. It’s around 65,000 words long at the moment and I know there are still quite a few changes to be made. Some minor characters are irrelevant and could be merged together to make one, much more interesting, supporting player. Some plot points are loose and could fall apart at the slightest inquisition. And, while most chapters are approximately the same length, there are a couple that are about three times the size of the smallest ones. None of these problems are insurmountable and I’m still quite confident of hitting my publishing deadline. But I keep asking myself the same question.

Will it ever be good enough?

Some days I look at the manuscript and think it’s a great big bag of steaming dogbob (without the bag). Other days I think it’s not half bad. But what do I know? I’m like the beaming mum at the school gates who believes that her child is the brainiest, cleanest, fastest kid in the class despite any lack of evidence. I’m far too close to my literary baby to look at it objectively.

But you know what? I've completed 65,000 words of my novel. Many writers never get that far. Some have manuscript in a shoe box on top of the wardrobe that they've been working on for years and, deep in their hearts, they know that they’ll never finish. I've written a beginning, a middle and an end of a book in which the story hangs together, the characters act and speak pretty naturally and the world that they inhabit seems quite real to them and to me. Overall I'm quite pleased with it.

For right now at least, that'll do.

Dark Inspiration

It’s not been a great couple of weeks to watch the news. Let’s be honest: it rarely is. But this last month seems to have been particularly bad. There have been some awful events in China, Boston, Pakistan and Texas which have dominated broadcasts around the world. Some truly harrowing stories have come out of these events as well as some acts of heroic courage.

My question this week is this: is it acceptable for artists of any form to use this suffering as inspiration or background material for our art? Is it right for any of us to take on board the information we’ve seen and use it in our later work?

All creative types draw upon their own life experiences in their work whether consciously or not, overtly or (much more likely) just as vague creative stimulation. It’s much easier to write, sculpt, paint (or whatever your particular artistic medium may be) something that’s vaguely like an event or object that we’ve seen or experienced in some way than it is to try to conjure a scenario and its entire associated range of emotions out of thin air. So if I were writing a love story I might remember how I feel about my own Beloved. If someone was to paint a field of poppies then there would be no better way to get the sight, smells and all the other senses fixed in their mind than to go to a poppy field and experience one for themselves. And if we were to create an artwork based on less pleasant subject matter the same thing stands. We have to experience, even if via a television screen, that uncomfortable situation to some degree. Thomas Harris doesn’t need to be a murderer to write about Hannibal Lecter but he does have to find some way inside his fictional killer’s head. He, I and all creative types need to have an understanding of what we’re creating, however far from the pleasant lives that we’d wish for ourselves that may be. We use what we see to make our work more believable.

The other way of looking at this of course is that we have to create. I need to write. Painters need to paint. It’s part of our make-up. Whether others appreciate our work or not is, to some degree, irrelevant. We’d do it even if we were the last people on earth. And we don’t just invent situations; we make lasting archives of the world around us. Artists record what they see.

With that in mind it would be foolish to think that events like those we’ve seen over the last few weeks would not, in some way, influence our work. 

Sometimes we take our inspiration from dark places.

The Decade That Taste (and Decency) Forgot

I grew up in the seventies. As childhoods go mine was definitely one of the better ones. Long hot summers, a loving family and good, wholesome entertainment on my television and radio. Who could ask for more?

Well, me. I could ask for the innocence of it all back please.

Yes, I came from a caring nuclear family and yes, the weather (especially in the middle of the decade) was warmer, for longer, than average. But the entertainment? At the time it was great and throughout the decades since I’ve smiled with nostalgia at the repeats, but now? Now the memories are tainted. Now little pieces of my childhood are being fouled with each new news revelation.

On the radio I listened to Dave Lee Travis playing the hits of Gary Glitter and others stars of the day, while John Peel spun more cutting edge discs later in the evenings. The Rolf Harris Show (under various names) was a television staple as were Jim’ll Fix It and It’s a Knockout. Jim Davidson and Freddie Starr were on every chat show going and had everyone in our house, from granny down to me, laughing together.

While many will say that they always felt that there was something ‘funny’ about some of these people the fact remains that they were among the most popular entertainers of their day. It wasn’t just me that enjoyed their work.

I’m not defending anyone here and if they’ve committed crimes then they should be punished. On the other hand everyone is entitled to a fair trial and, here in Britain, we’re all assumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law but those still living have had their careers, like my innocent memories, shattered. This is, of course, nothing compared to what’s happened to the alleged victims in these cases.

I guess it’s the age-old question here again. Can we still love the art if we’ve subsequently learned to despise the artist as a person? And sure, we all look back at our youth with rose-tinted vision but could everything that we enjoyed back then have been, in reality, so awful?

My memory isn't what it was.

Habitual Addiction

They say that you need to do something for twenty-one consecutive days to form a new habit. Repeat the pattern daily for three weeks, whether you want to or not, and it will be mentally hard-wired into your daily routine. You’ll do it automatically. It’s become a habit.

Taking that same logic, I suppose that the same length of time would apply to breaking a habit. If you do something all the time and then, for twenty-one days, you make an active decision not to do it you’re creating a new habit, one of not doing the action that you previously did regularly. Note, that’s breaking a habit, not an addiction. So you might be able to stop doing something like biting your toenails in three weeks but kicking a chemical addiction to, say, nicotine could take a lifetime.

I really want to get back into the exercise habit. A healthy body helps a healthy mind, right? While I was never the fittest or most athletic person in the land I did at least make an effort. I used to run. I used to pedal miles without getting anywhere on the static bike in my dining room. I used to walk up hills that quite literally reached into the clouds. I even used to do yoga for heaven’s sake! And no, before you ask: that’s an image that will never make it onto YouTube while there’s breath left in my body. So what happened? Why do I no longer do these things? Why have I reverted to my previous alter-ego of Tub-O-Lard Man? I simply stopped doing the things that burned calories. I lost the desire and, three weeks later, I’d simply slipped out of the habit (as the nun said on bath night).

But habits that cause chemical changes in the brain (as exercise does) have a habit of evolving into fully-fledged addictions if you’re not careful. And it can be many things, some that you might not expect. For example, I know quite a few people who will argue strenuously that they’re not addicted to exercise. No sir. Definitely not. No way, José. Yet take this idea for a moment…

Imagine someone who drinks alcohol, quite a bit of it every day. Much more than you and I would consider to be healthy. They just can’t get enough of it, usually two heavy sessions a day. They may not want to admit it but they’re hooked on the chemicals that the demon drink gives them and if for whatever reason they can’t get their boozy fix for a day or so they become anxious, stressed or worse. You’d say that they have a problem whether they want to acknowledge it or not, right?

Now re-read that previous paragraph but change all references to drinking alcohol so that they instead point to doing some form of exercise. It’s a healthier option, sure, but is it still completely healthy? Physically, they might be in peak condition but emotionally or socially? I’m not so sure.

I’d rather take the holistic approach. Everything in moderation, they say, and that applies to anything that you may think that you’re addicted to. But where exercise is concerned, moderation is a heck of a lot better than none at all. So this week I’m making an effort. I’m going to get off my considerable behind and try to get a little fitter. I don’t ever want to get to that stage where physical exertion defines me but I do want to do something every day, even if it’s just a walk to the paper shop.

Today is the first day of the next three weeks.

© Shaun Finnie 2013