Mistreating Yourself

Posted by David Duhr in Strategies      27 comments

Jun
1

Discussion question: Are you prone to emotional and/or physical malaise as a result of writing? Does it affect you during your writing sessions, after, or both? How do you mitigate these effects, and how do you recover from them? Do you recall a particularly difficult example? Let us know in the comments.

During last week’s discussion about mistreating our characters, Elissa M. mentioned how an intense writing project, a novelette, of hers took a physical toll: “I wrote it in three days over the course of about ten,” she said, “needing recovery time for myself after each session.”

The week before, in “Let’s Talk About Our Writing Fears,” Susan trod similar ground with one of her fears, “a subtype of ‘Fear of Never Finishing’ and it’s a fear of not being able to stop–forgetting to sleep, missing the alarm, being late for the day job.”

To which David L replied, “Also you can add the lack of physical exercise that happens when we write a lot.”

We talk often about the mental approach to writing, but not very often about the physical approach, nor about how writing can drain us both mentally and physically.

So… let’s!

I think I’ve established by now the fact that I’m not a “write daily” kind of writer. I tend to go days, sometimes weeks at a time without writing a word. Then one day, something will click, and I’ll sit down and start writing, and the next thing I know, hours have passed without my knowledge.

In my younger days, sometimes an entire night would go by.

In undergrad and grad school, anytime I had a story due I would knock out the entire thing the night before, often writing until the morning. Procrastination brought on by fear, no doubt. But also, there was something exhilarating about it.

But it was far from healthy. When I’d finally snap out of my writing fugue, I would find an overflowing ashtray and not remember lighting or smoking a single cigarette, and I would find an empty coffee pot without remembering pouring or drinking a single cup. And I’d feel like hell for the next several days, jittery and coughing when awake, jittery and coughing while asleep.

The fiction I wrote at the time wasn’t mentally/emotionally taxing, because I hadn’t yet learned to tap into my feelings while writing. If I had? Oof. Things could’ve gotten real ugly.

I still write in long sessions, but never overnight anymore. And I don’t drink coffee at night, and I no longer smoke cigarettes. There’s rarely much of a physical toll, besides maybe a little post-fugue fatigue.

But sometimes there’s an emotional toll. Particularly on the rare occasions I work on my memoir. Even my fiction these days is much closer to the bone.

It’s never debilitating–the worst that happens is I’m a little glum and/or listless the next day–but I can understand why writing might prove emotionally devastating for some writers.

But that devastation is often the result of some excellent writing. So the question isn’t how can we avoid these emotional and physical effects. Because we don’t want to, right?

The question is, how do we recover? How do we mitigate these effects? How do we plan ahead?

What are you more prone to, physical malaise or emotional? Do these affect you during your writing sessions, after, or both? Is there a particularly difficult incident you’d be willing to share?

Let’s talk about it in the comments below.

WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is fiction editor at the Texas Observer and co-host of the Yak Babies podcast, and has written about books for the Dallas Morning News, Electric Literature, Publishing Perspectives, and others.

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