What it takes to write a book (kind of)

Obviously everything is stressful all the time is over-trodden ground, but I've been thinking a bit this week about how that's interacting with my work, or my attempts to do work. I've been dealing with chronic stress for a while now and, unsurprisingly, it makes it incredibly difficult to write. This is frustrating both because I'm trying to make a living and because there's really nothing better for my mental health than writing. There's nothing worse for my mental health than trying to write and failing. Terrible position to be in, really.

Everyone is stressed all the time currently, and we should be. The world is being run by dickheads, all the wrong people have all the money and power, there is very little political will to confront the myriad crises of the current era. And the rest of us just have to watch it happen? Sometimes go to a protest? Write to our MPs? Post through it? Only the ignorant and insane are free from stress right now.

I'm stressed all the time currently because I've been trying to find a job and/or sell a book and/or get some other commission for more than two years with only occasional periods of respite. Getting no bites on my book proposals or audio pitches or what have you is fine, really. To work in any creative fields is to be professionally rejected more often than not, but those rejections coinciding with the more tedious failure of my search for just a job, any job, is kind of a lot to take.

It's such an undignified form of depression. The speed with which I felt absolutely fine after finally getting a job towards the end of last year is frankly embarrassing. Mentally thriving within minutes, extremely inelegant. Now that that job has slowly crumbled away to nothing and I am, once more, desperately scouring job sites, my energy levels and mental clarity have again plummeted to historic lows.

It's not surprising that this has a negative impact on my ability to focus when I try to write. For one thing, it's exhausting being stressed like this. My sleep is interrupted at best, every mundane life decision like what to make for dinner is burdened with the awareness of the fact that groceries cost money; it is relentless.

It's obvious why all this makes writing harder. Writing requires focus. It requires a degree of mental alertness. You have to be able to wrench yourself away from all your coping mechanisms and sit at your desk for a large chunk of the day and put words in sequence again and again. But I think something more important is lost too.

No one denies that writing requires bursts of intense, focussed activity, but for that to occur you need something else. You need some degree of control over where your mind goes when it wanders.

If you want to write a novel and the only time you think about that novel is when you sit down at your desk try to write it, there won't be very much there. All the pressure to come up with everything sits in that one little time slot, with the weight of your target word count pressing down on you.

This is kind of why writing your first book is comparatively easy. You're doing it purely because you want to, because you have an idea that feel interesting to you, and you think about it when really you shouldn't be. Thinking about your book is how you procrastinate from your more concrete responsibilities.

I was working at a shop when I wrote my first published novel and I would constantly be told off for not immediately restocking shelves that were one or two items away from full because I was writing down ideas in my notebook. And when I wasn't writing down ideas, I was daydreaming about them. It dominated my thoughts.

So when I had time to sit down and write, there was a lot there to draw from. I'm not saying it was always easy or natural, I'm not saying I never procrastinated (I'm a naturally lazy person), I'm just saying that there was a lot in my head to put out onto the page.

One of the interesting side effects of writing novels is that you start to learn quite a lot about your brain. Not necessarily how it works, but definitely what it does. During one of the rewrites of that novel, for example, I was stuck on a particular point. I looked at it for ages, I desperately tried to think of a solution to whatever the problem was and I had nothing. So I gave up and moved on to something else for a week or so and when I came back to that problem it was just solved. Without my having consciously thought about it for days.

Your brain does so much that you're not aware of, which is both interesting and reassuring. You don't have to beat yourself up for being stuck, you just have to let go and trust that when you're ready to pick that issue up again you'll have a way through. Your mind will have been working through it in the background without you realising.

But your subconscious mind is influenced by where your conscious mind goes. So if you want your subconscious mind to be working on your book, you need your conscious mind to be going in that direction. You need it to be your first preoccupation. Almost an obsession.

In an ideal world, where basic needs are met, and met securely, you probably have the freedom for that to happen organically. You can meander through your life and when inspiration hits you can let yourself gently follow it until it grows into something of substance.

Most of us don't have this luxury. If you need to write a lot to make ends meet, if you need to write to commissions or briefs that you didn't choose, you need to find a way to cultivate that obsession deliberately.

Mostly doing this is deeply uncool. Completely counter to anyone's idea of an artistic life (we can blame the romantic poets for everyone's idea of an artistic life, btw). You can't just wander, brooding, across the moors turning over your plot in your mind. You can't stare at the wind rippling over the water or stirring up the dandelions as characters take shape within you.

You have to do nerd-ass shit like writing exercises. You have to sit down with a notebook and make lists of books your lead character has read. Or write a letter from the love interest to their grandfather.

These kinds of things are not necessarily designed to give you actual material for the book; they're just to direct your mind along the path you want it to take when it is idle. So that when you sit down every day, with the precise word count you've calculated to get you to your eighty to a hundred thousand words by the deadline set by your publisher, there's something there to draw from.

In my experience, writing is easy. But starting to write is nigh on impossible, and you have to start writing every day, multiple times. If your mind at rest moves towards what you're working on, it gets a lot more possible.

Due to what I'm calling the circumstances, by which I mean my constant financial stress to which I see no end, my mind at rest moves towards money, all the time, constantly.

I'm doing my best to redirect it. I'm doing deeply uncool writing exercises. I've created short, specific playlists to listen to when, and only when, and always when I'm working on a project, to try and jolt my brain into the right lane on association. Like pavlov's writer.

This is all the more frustrating and, honestly, a bit demeaning because I'm not writing to commission right now. I haven't had a pitch or proposal accepted in two years, I'm creatively free to do whatever I want and, because of the circumstances it's even harder than writing to a brief.

Mental health in the arts is well trodden ground. Everyone expects artists to be a bit mad, in one way or another, naturally, but the job itself is not conducive to emotional stability.

You spend all your time trying to make something to put out into the world and you never know if it's good, or if it will sell – to a publisher or an audience – and you never know if its success or failure is deserved. You obsess over the nuance of language, each little turn of phrase, every descriptor and metaphor, and then are confronted with the possibility that no one else will actually pick up on or care about that nuance anyway. You are, again, in the business of being professionally rejected.

All of this comes with the territory; all of this I was prepared for. I used to be an actor, it's even worse over there. I was also prepared for financial uncertainty. I didn't have to choose this life. I could have studied something sensible, I could have followed a more reliable path. I wasn't entirely prepared for the financial uncertainty to make it this much harder to just do the work.

I don't say all this because I'm feeling sorry for myself and I want everyone else to feel sorry for me too. I'm just the best example I have for how artistic work happens and I think it's important for people to understand how artistic work happens.

I've said this before, but art is both undervalued and overvalued at the same time. People who don't know how this kind of work is done view it as kind of magical and I think it's because of that that income disparity in the arts is so vast. An artist is either a vaunted national treasure or someone barely worth paying. It's also because of this that people insist that generating shit with AI is art too.

It is only getting harder for working artists to have stable careers and that is bad for everyone. We all want art and entertainment in our lives; we all want a large amount of the stuff we like to be coming out all the time. Whether it's books or movies or tv shows or video games or whatever.

All industries are becoming less and less stable and that means all working artists are becoming less and less stable – and financial instability causes intense mental and emotional harm. All of which makes it harder and harder for artists to just do the work. The work that, really, everyone wants them to be doing, because everyone wants the output.

This is likely why the Irish artistic UBI has been so successful. Just a little bit of predictable, safe income frees up a person's mind and allows them to think of their work before they think of their groceries.

What a life.