The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: depression

  • Depressing Non-fiction

    I have a short attention span when it comes to non-fiction.

    I feel like I could tackle just about any non-fiction topic, but then I remind myself that it’s probably impossible for me to write a whole book about anything. I love to do research for my novels, but to write a whole non-fiction book, I know I’d really have to dive into a topic, stay dedicated to it, and not drop it when I had the most basic understanding of it.

    That’s why I like the Confabulator Café posts. Perfect little 300-500 word bites of knowledge imparted from my brain to you. Short, concise, and no need of extensive (if any) research. I can handle that. I could probably talk about myself for a whole novel. So perhaps that’s what my non-fiction book would be. I did write a memoir once. Memoirs can be my non-fiction. (more…)

  • Quitting Might Be a Symptom

    I’ve never actively quit writing on the whole, in the sense that I actively made the decision to stop writing. I have, however, let life overwhelm my desire to write and stop me from going on. I’ve also quit writing fanfiction, which I love, because I thought it was the ‘more mature’ choice. (I’ve since started again.)

    Both sucked.

    Good news: neither was permanent. If you read nothing else in the big anecdotal love-fest that’s about to go down here, then take this: Just because you’ve stopped, doesn’t mean that you can’t start again. If you’re suffering from the lack of creative output, then stop suffering and start writing again.

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  • It’s Never Just Writer’s Block

    In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the classic meandering semi-fictional work from the 60s, narrator-author Robert Persig tells a student suffering from writer’s block to start writing about one brick in one building on her town’s main street.  The student comes back to him transfixed, with pages and pages of writing about that brick, and the next, and then the whole building and whole downtown and EVERYTHING, and the curse was lifted!  She was no longer blocked and could write ecstatically.

    Alas, if only writer’s block was really that easy to overcome. The question this week asks if there’s such a thing as “writer’s block,” and I suppose my answer to that is “no.”  I don’t believe there’s an actual psychological condition that hinders a previously productive writer from working.  It’s something of an excuse, something of a myth–you can always write about that first brick, right?

    Except when you can’t.  And at those times,”writer’s block” is a convenient shorthand for whatever is wrong. Depression, for one, cripples creativity and pretty much everything else too.  It certainly blocks writing for some people (and usually for me). I know many great writers managed to keep going through depression–indeed, rumor has it that Shirley Jackson, among others, actually wrote herself out of depression–and I admire this feat, but that’s not how it usually works for me.  Depression accompanies self-doubt, this suspicion that my words and ideas are worthless and don’t even deserve the data space on my computer.

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