When your best advice is your worst



Francisco de Goya y Lucientes - Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos

"Like a dormant virus, an unwelcome relative, or the annual tax-bill, 'depression and the writer' is a subject that has reoccured over the last few years with uncomfortable regularity."

In the 'Other job', I’ve given advice to aspiring writers who are suffering with disability and/or mental illness. It didn't take me long to discover the primary barrier to creativity is motivation, the reason to sit down and write when all they can see is the reasons not to. That’s not so unusual, as when afflicted with ill-health, you will usually identify what you cannot do before what you can. Why would writing be any different?

Writer’s Block is a term I don’t encourage because it implies writers alone suffer creative malaise. I believe a person can have inspirational block, creative constipation or can feel the colour draining out of every endeavour, and I guess that’s not too dissimilar to depression if you speak to your local psychologist. True, a writer can feel a lack of confidence in their abilities, might feel each word is poorly connected to the last, when comparing themselves to their peers. But so does the footballer that cannot get into the first team. The corner-shop owner that cannot keep up with the local Tescos. The keen gardener whose plants keep dying while their neighbour’s flourish.

The term Writer’s Block feels like part of the problem, really. A self-diagnosis without looking at what is really going on. A matter to be had between the person and the local GP, or someone who is a good listener.

But regardless of however you define the problem, my solution has been, as with depression and its kin, to work the mind through it. In the case of writing, just keep plugging away, and look for the reason for the problem rather than a reaction to what is really happening. 

‘Write through it. You’ll get there.’

Like any advice, mine was subjective. But for me, at least, this solution worked and I was comforted by that. Maybe arrogantly so.

And yet, as a writer who has grown from the philopsophy of the Black and White, into shades of Grey and Revelation, I was unsurprised to see my solution failing me to some extent…

*

2016 was a shit year. Let’s be blunt about that. There was some sheer craziness about last year, and some unrelentingly bleak moments. Some personal, some worldly. I achieved a lot in some corners, achieved little or nothing in others, in the ones that mean the most to me. That has spurred me on for this year, and while not being a new year’s resolution, I will revise my priorities (the writing, for example, is getting a kick up the arse). But it’s the loss that had me navel gazing at the close of 2016: loss of faith in people; and a loss in the family.

It’s not unusual for the writing community to feel the last 12 months offers a bleak future at least in the short term. In 2004, I predicted the 2006 world financial crisis during a night out with friends, and was told I was being too bleak, and that it couldn’t happen (they wouldn’t let it happen, was the general response) and perhaps I should still buy the house we had our eyes on. I predicted 2006 because that’s what I do as a writer. I look into what might happen, and could happen, and I try to do it logically so the reader thinks it will happen without having to suspend disbelief.

That logical imagination is a wonderful gift when you’re trying to write compelling fiction (or you’re in risk management).

But it also gives you sleepless nights too.

For me, the financial crisis of 2006 was like a slow moving train crash on a level crossing. And I can see the UK leaving the EU being another slow-moving train-crash. Sure, nothing’s happened of note so far, but for rising inflation caused by the pound’s sinking-feeling, but it’s coming. And it’s coming for everyone as some kind of pain. From pensioners losing their Triple-Lock (where else will they find the money, folks?) to people losing their businesses and jobs, it’s coming, like a movie billboard advertising the next disaster. You don’t have to be a writer to imagine what the next few years will be like.

And then there’s Trump, your writer’s favourite subject, as he represents every villain in the ‘end-of-the-world’ books that you care to read. He is the Greg Stillson of the 21^st Century… And yet, he became president? That never happened in the Deadzone as I recall*.

(*And you know, I’ve often wondered if we live in an alternative The Man in the High Castle-reality, inexplicably torn from a true reality by some catastrophic event in 2016, where Trump won, the UK lost, and Leicester won the Premier League. As writers, we wouldn’t have dared dreamt this up–you’d have to suspend disbelief pretty far to conjure up 2016, wouldn’t you?)

As writers, as imaginers of what might happen rather than what has, we can see the train-crash in minute detail before it occurs. We know what will be lost, and how. We know the grief, the scars, and while we can see hope, we know how hard it will be to get through it. A reason why most writers of genre fiction are looking at 2016 as a horror year, the year where the nightmares they’ve put down on paper, or have considered writing, came true. It’s then that a writer’s imagination is not a gift, but a curse.

So as an antidote to Trump, and 2016, I wrote a new story, something that would write through my anxieties of this new reality we face; an attempt to ‘work my way through it’. After all, that has been my solution to everything.

And yet it was not a solution. The story I was writing made it worse. A story that was bleak, but offered hope, and yet bummed-me-out from the first word to the last, when I set down to write it recently. Did ‘working my way through it’ help? No, it made me feel much worse. To the point I’ve been through a short-lived spell of depression that has caused me to stop doing the thing I loved for a while, to force me into almost ostrich-like behaviour*.

(*I now believe that putting your head in the sand is Nature’s pause, allowing you to get mentally fit in order to deal with the stuff going on above ground, you know?)

You see, I can’t change the world. (Alas, I am an observer and commentator, little more.) I'm not arrogant enough to believe I'm bigger than that, and there lies salvation, because if you can't change the world, there is no burden to do so. 

But what I can do is hope. 
Yeah, I can do that too. There are other brighter souls who can change the world, I believe that. So there are reasons to be optimistic.
Reasons to keep going.
To keep writing.

*

I haven’t looked forward to 2017. I’ll be honest.

But I am glad to see the back of 2016.

The personal loss of a family member at the end of last year has put much into perspective. It has reminded me of my mortality, and I’ve asked myself the question of what is there after this, on more than one occasion. And while not a follower of religion, I do believe there is more, beyond natural self-preservation.

It’s this optimism that is the root of my solution, as it has been in the past. I write through problems because I believe beyond the problem is reward. I work through depression because I know there is something to hope for, to bring happiness. And I will write on through 2017 no matter what it brings because it is just another year. Whether 2017 turns into something from a Philip K. Dick story or not.

Because, what else should we be doing with the time that is given to us, but what we do best?