Writing shouldn't be depressing

Last week, our class read an interview with author Jenny Offill. She was frank and she did not mystify the writing process. At first, I liked her distinction of anxious writers from depressive writers. Anxiety got my dissertation done. Depression got me nowhere.

The sentiment might be true but it should not become gospel. A staff member at the start of the year said that most good writing comes from a place of anguish, the corollary being that mental illness is writing. Too often, recently, I have acted on impulse or retreated or spiralled and thought, good for the novel, at least. Authentic.

That writers are presumed to be neurotic has little to do with the act of writing itself. A lot of us are writers because writing constitutes a large part of professional or administrative work. You put words on a page and those words form sentences and to form that sentence you must unearth awful memories and sit with awful feelings, especially if sentences are the modality of your art. That’s tough, in the same way that dealing with the public can be tough, that not dealing with anyone can be tough.

The security guard at my apartment building has a therapy dog called Spirit. On Monday morning the therapy dog jumped out at me from his buggy because (so the security guard said) he could sense that I was tired and stressed. All I have done recently is work on my novel and turn up to class.

I do not call myself a writer because I think if your vocation causes you distress then you should employ measures to alleviate distress. Distress should not become your personhood. If writing is something you choose to do then you should not, on the whole, suffer from it. This was not the takeaway from yesterday’s workshop. The powerpoint was called ‘endurance’. We were asked to write down three scenes in our work that we hate. Supposedly, it is a good thing to despise your work, to feel frustrated because that means the work is evolving. I agree that to improve is to sit with discomfort but I think you should seek support if your passion is making you miserable. That is not art, that is mental illness and you should attend to it and step away from its source.