Is It Time to Call it Quits?

Back in 2011 I wrote this blog post (read it if you wish) about losing my muse. Until I lost my muse, writing was so automatic, so real, the words and scenes and dialogue so vivid, that writing was really very easy for me. Then I lost my muse, and it's never returned. This loss happened just a month or two before I retired from the world of work. The loss of my muse was a terrible loss. Before very long it became apparent that it wasn't coming back, and it hasn't.

Despite that, writing was all I knew. It was still my dream, and I had (still have) much unfinished/unpolished material to work on. For the past three years I've been living off that surplus; yes, I've been living off the past. My short story collection The Gunman in Black was the first original fiction I'd written in three years. I've also written three more stories yet to be published. This appears to have been a temporary burst of creativity, because I've been unable to write anything new since February. In fact, I've been unable to write anything except a few blog posts and entries in my journal . As far as fiction goes, my mind seems to have become completely blank. I fear that my ability to write fiction has died.

The question has been floating around in my mind for a while now. Is it time to call it quits? The thought of trying to write a novel, to spend months and months, possible years, on it, struggling with every sentence, every scene, with all the complexities of creating a novel, seems an impossible task now. Lately, I haven't been able to even grasp the possibility of doing so. It just seems too difficult now. So, is it time to call it quits as a writer?

The desire to write still comes and goes. But it doesn't lead to action. So, I've been trying to accept the reality of my situation. Maybe it is time to call it quits.

The Power of Sleep

Sleep is a vital component of living; without adequate sleep, we remain tired and grumpy, perhaps even lethargic and/or depressed.

 It appears that adequate sleep can be different for different people, but I'll assume the tried-and-true 8 hours per night is adequate. The key word is "adequate". Being a person who suffers from sleep apnea and uses a cpap machine to get adequate sleep, I have experience with the problem of lack of adequate sleep. Before I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, perhaps 15 years ago, a 12-hour night of sleep left me exhausted and practically unable to function. I fell asleep at work more often than I want to admit. Fortunately, I had understanding co-workers and didn't get fired. I still need about 10 hours of sleep per night to feel alert. So, just to function in a busy and chaotic world, we need adequate sleep.

But adequate sleep has other benefits than just keeping our energy level high. For the creative writer, it may be an important component of our creativity. An article in the April 23, 2012 Time magazine "Shhh! Genius at Work" discusses the importance of sleep to creativity. Several scientific studies support the connection between sleep and creativity (and problem solving). The article mentions that Mary Shelley came up with the idea for her novel Frankenstein from a dream.

I think most writers can attest to the power of sleep for our writing. I see on blogs a lot of talk about sleep. Mostly complaints about not getting enough sleep, even complaints of coming up with ideas in sleep and waking up. But, really, this is a positive effect of sleeping well. Our minds are free from the restraints of our awake consciousness. This freedom of the mind to try out different solutions to problems while we're sleeping allows for more options: greater creativity. Many, many times I've awoken in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem in a story I was working on, mainly problems of plot. I've always valued ideas generated when I was asleep. I've written dialogue, even entire scenes in my mind while asleep, woke up, and wrote it all down at 2 a.m.

This tremendous benefit of sleeping may actually become a liability for many writers. And I think this is the primary problem for many of us. This waking up in the middle of the night causes us to be tired during the day when we have to work at our full time jobs. It helps make our workday unhappy, and this causes dilemmas for us. It probably kills more writing careers than anything. We just can't do both, write well and consistently when we're tired. Time management also becomes a big issue. But that's another topic. (This also goes for stay-at-home moms, who are also writers, with young children to care for.) The obstacles to writing are so great for both that many just give up.

But the full time writer, especially without children to care for, who can sleep as late as she wants, can reap tremendous rewards from waking up in the middle of the night to write down her inspirations. It's just too bad the vast majority of us can't live without a full time job. Most of us don't want to live in poverty, especially if we have families. Plus, in the USA, our jobs are our source for health insurance: no job, no insurance (not good). Unfortunately, we opt for our jobs, security, and suffer the unhappy consequences of hating our jobs.

Creativity is messy.

This is a page from my work in progress. And this is perhaps the fourth draft of the novel that I'm working on. You would think that by the fourth draft, there would be nothing to change. Yet, there you see it. It looks messy, doesn't it.

Yes, I've come to believe that creativity is messy--all kinds of creativity. From painting, to sculpture, to writing, to photography, to music, to dance, to sex, it's all messy. Yet for the people involved, it's the greatest thing in the world.

What do you think?

Do prescription drugs for depression interfere with creativity?

Do prescription drugs for depression interfere with creativity? Do they interfere with productivity? Or do they help? As someone who takes Prozac for depression, it's a serious question. It was a fear of mine that taking anti-depressants would block my creativity, and I suffered from depression for more years than I needed to because of that fear.

Has taking anti-depressants blocked my creativity? I've been taking anti-depressants for at least fifteen years, and during that time, mostly during the past ten years, I've written three new novels and revised another one. I've written short stories and travel articles. So I feel that it has not blocked my creativity. There's something mysterious about creativity. I don't think we can control it. We can deny it or ignore it, but we can't control it. It exists of its own accord and by its own rules.

There may be some drugs that can block creativity, but probably by blocking our mental functioning--putting us to sleep or making us sick as a side-effect or something like that. Many people have undergone chemotherapy and survived their cancer and wrote wonderful books about it, or wonderful novels. But those drugs aren't designed to affect your mood, whereas anti-depressants are in some manner doing that.

William Styron wrote his wonderful book "Darkness Visible" about his decent into depression. Drugs were of no help to him. Only time, and maybe therapy, pulled him out of it. So often I wish it were possible for me to just stop taking drugs and gradually get better and better, but it just doesn't seem to work that way for me.

What Is Creativity? (1)

Many people have explained what creativity is. But, of course, none of these explanations are scientific or infallible. Their explanations are based on their own experiences and what they think it is. And so it is with me.

Putting words on paper, or color on canvas, or musical notes on scores, interpreting the words of others as an actor/actress, and so on are all creative acts as long as they are yours, not merely copying someone else's.

Using your imagination is a creative act. Transforming what you imagine into words, art, music makes the creative act more solid, more permanent, though it will probably never be exactly as we imagined it. The final product will be different, because what we imagine takes on a life of its own. The creative act becomes organic. It speaks to us. It tells us what to do. And we listen. So, in a sense, we are doing nothing--it's doing itself through us. This still doesn't tell us "what" creativity is. There are some hints: imagination, transforming, permanence, organic.