January Funk
This is a bad time of year. The thrills of the holidays are past, and so is the sense of a blessed return to quiet normality. Now all we have is several dreary months to ride out before spring returns events to the community calendar. I’m in a serious funk, which I won’t write about here. Other people’s personal problems are as boring a topic as you can find – and yes, that includes Michael Jackson. But I will write about the merry hell depression plays with writing.
Some blessed writers find putting words to paper as easy as thinking; often, the processes are identical. E. B. White once wrote a letter to an interviewer after an unsatisfying interview, offering answers in full, and apologizing that he (White) could not think adequately without his typewriter. No doubt that’s annoying for such writers in their daily routines (“Which floor?” “Uh…just a second.” tak takka tak tak tak “Seven, please.”), but there can’t be any terror of the blank page. There’s no worry over whether the writer has anything to say. He doesn’t know until the words are written, and by then, the work is done. It may not be good, but the dreadful blank page has been slain.
I work from the other direction: first decide what to say, then grapple with the word processor to work out how to say it. I don’t want writers wasting my time; why should my readers be any different? And on those days when I have nothing meaningful to say…*thud*.
The catch is that I’m a poor judge of whether the day’s thoughts are interesting. Ideas which are old, or seem obvious, to me are new to somebody. Maybe you. Eileene harangues me often, and in various contetxts, about my exaggerated notions of general knowledge. Depression magnifies misgivings about content tenfold. When you want the whole frustrating world – dust, missing mobile phones, weight gain, paper cuts – just to go away for a day, it’s awfully hard to get enthused about sharing it with folks. In desperation, it’s possible to try a stream of consciousness exercise, but depression, almost by definition, stultifies thought. If you can’t pull off stream of consciousness writing in a good mood, you surely can’t pull it off in the doldrums.
Worst of all, there is little more discouraging to future writing than writing badly. Writing improves only through vigorous exercise. The process feeds on itself.
Don’t stop.
You may not be able to control your mood, but you can force yourself to put something down. It will stink. That’s okay; all writing stinks without some serious blue pencil work. But without working past to something worth reading, it will remain stinky forever. If you have to be miserable, what better time to do work that would make you miserable, anyway? Have faith something good will bloom from the labor.