SquarePeg Books

How do major life events affect your writing? Has writing ever helped you through something?

Y’all need to stop stalking me. I know I’m so fascinating, but asking questions like this is more creepy than the heavy breather on the phone (who incorrectly describes me, by the by).

Years of observation have shown me a few things –

1. Daily “low” stress, like constant volunteering for non-profits, kills my ability to write. Apathy sets in and even though there’s a desire to write, anything like “creative thought” has been diverted to solve other problems.
2. Acute stress, like dealing with a medical emergency of a family member, have the ability to kick my writing in gear or sometimes into overdrive – This is how the first draft of my first fantasy novel was written in 28 days from start to finish.
3. Catastrophic stress, like the kind in which you fall apart due to hysteria for several days, kills my writing. There is no writing while hysterically sobbing because of a Real World situation.

None of these options are what I would call a fun time. I think my writing is somehow helpful in that it gives me a space to retreat to. Sort of a denial type thing – in my worlds, characters don’t have to deal with car accidents or strokes or whatever unless I say so. I can build, I can create, I can add, subtract or delete with total god-like omnipotence.

Denial can be awesome. Denial also only gets you so far.

Some things end up in the writing. Verbatim. Other things don’t, but the emotion of the event helps to fill in the emotion for the scene.

Right now I’m going through an issue or three (depends on how you look at it). In the beginning, in the thick of the crisis, I was writing a lot. Now that’s kinda drained off as time has passed other things have popped up related to the initial issue, so now things are resembling the “daily stress” situation again, with added moments of “catastrophic stress” thrown in for flavor.

I feel frozen. There were complications to the “writing life” prior to all this, but I was clearing them away. Now they’ve been replaced by other complications that have totally shifted my foundation. Do I turn left? Do I abandon the site and start over with a completely new design? Do I stay where I am? Would it be at all responsible to wait 6 months to see how it all shakes out?

Can I find a part-time job that would allow me to deal with the kids? Should I? Can I pull myself together to write faster? Will I adjust to all of this and be able to write at all?

Should I consider my writing to be nothing more than “a cute hobby” as everyone else considers it? I don’t want to let the whole publishing dream go, but it seems that every time I try to balance it with life in general, something pops up to wreck it all.