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.