Your Writing Fugue and You

Posted by David Duhr in Strategies      12 comments

Sep
9

TL;DR version: If you lose track of all time and space when you write, you’re not alone. It’s (unofficially) called a writing fugue, and it happens to many of us. WriteByNighter Joe C. worries that his writing fugues are a problem: he forgets to eat, forgets to move around, forgets to pee. If a writing fugue leads to better writing but some physical discomfort, is it worth it? It’s a question each fuguer must answer for him or herself.

Lately we’ve all spent a lot of time discussing process, inspiration, where we write, how we write. What kind of headspace we need to get into in order to produce words.

WriteByNighter Joe C. emailed to ask us about his process, in which he goes into a sort of trance when he writes, losing touch with both the world outside and with his own internal workings.

“It’s almost self-destructive, what I do,” Joe writes. “Basically, I forget to do a fuckn’ thing. I have coffee [and start writing] … and then suddenly it’s 4 p.m., my back is stiff, and I realize I’ve been holding my bladder to the point of pain. I lose myself completely, and it happens all the time. … It’s weird.  My question is if you know of anyone who experiences this same behavior when they write.”

Justine and I had a writing professor who refers to this as a “fugue state.” It’s not the actual dissociative disorder — don’t panic! — but it does resemble it in some ways.

And it happens to me all the time.

Your turn: Do you enter a fugue state when you write? What are the effects? Are you disoriented when you come out of it? Let us know in the comments below.

Fugue Me

In fact, I remember my first writing fugue. I was an undergrad taking my first fiction workshop, and I had a story due the following day. I was in a procrastination panic, starting to feel frantic; and with no ideas coming my way, I could almost hear the blinking cursor mock me: “You can’t write [blink] you can’t write [blink].”

Then an idea came to me about a kid taking his dead father’s ashes across the country by train. It was a silly little story — I knew it even then — but I started typing. About three hours later I reached the end… and then realized that during that session I had lost all awareness of time and space.

I was so confused. I did a double-take at the clock, and then tried to remember one thing that had happened since I started writing. There’d been no bathroom or beverage breaks; my ashtray was near to overflowing with butts, but I couldn’t recall smoking a single cigarette.

The weirdest thing? I could remember hardly a single passage I’d written, nor more than a couple of plot points. The process, and the story itself, were almost complete mysteries to me.

It was a little bit frightening, but also exhilarating.

Now it’s merely a familiar part of my process.

Destroy in Order to Create

Joe worries that his fugue states are affecting his physiology: “Bad diet, totally sedentary activity, bad for the back and everything in the body, poor posture,” he writes. A fugue state “ruins my biorhythms, sleep, diet, exercise, spiritual practice, it all goes out the window.”

There’s no way to force a fugue state — it either happens or it doesn’t — but it’s nothing to be afraid of. In fact, when I snap out of a fugue state, I know the odds are good that I’ve just done some quality writing.

In my response to Joe, I dragged out a (semi-) relevant quote from Picasso, who said, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

If you’re like many artists, you believe that creativity should come at a cost; that an artist should suffer for his or her art. If that’s the case, losing oneself in a writing fugue every now and then is a small price.

If you think that’s balderdash, then look at it this way: If going into a writing fugue helps you produce better work, is it worth some bodily discomfort? That’s a question for each of us to answer for ourselves.

For me, it’s worth it. All it really means is that I’ve allowed myself to be swept away by the work. My writing while in a fugue state is usually better than the writing I produce when mentally present.

Your turn: If you’re a writing fuguer, revisit some passages you’ve written while in such a state and some passages you’ve written when not in such a state. Do you see a difference?

Be You

We all have different approaches to writing: what works for Joe won’t work for Jane and vice versa.

Some writers do better working in short daily bursts. It’s hard to enter a writing fugue that way, but it’s also hard to argue with daily production.

This doesn’t work for Joe, though. “When I do the typical writer disciplined routine thing, like take time every day to write,” he says, “I barely get into whatever epiphany I’ve come up with and it’s time to return to the real world. … I’m better with larger blocks of time, once or twice a week if I’m lucky.”

I believe I’m at my best when I’m writing nearly every day and with a fairly even mix of short sessions and long (fugue-inducing) ones.

There’s never a right way or a wrong way. There’s only your way. Embrace it.

WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is copy editor and fiction editor at the Texas Observer and writes about literature for the Dallas Morning News, Electric Literature, Publishing Perspectives, and others.

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