mental stability & writing
When I was a teenager I thought that I had to be, in many ways, broken to write. I was afraid to be happy or even content because (1) It would mess with my angsty self-image (2) I was afraid I wouldn’t have a reason to write. I rather enjoyed all the emotionally harsh things that happened to me because all of them were fuel for my stories.
Now when I’m a bit older, it seems to have shifted. I need to bring my inner world in some sort of order. Not a perfect order, but “I know where things stand and nobody’s moving them around when I’m not looking” order. I need to know myself well enough, and accept myself for who and what I am in order to chop away at writing.
Probably it’s because there are two different sorts of writing, two different positions from where to write. One, where you are standing on the edge of abyss and looking down, and you don’t mind if you fall (actually, you might even take that step over the edge). There’s that fascination with your own flawed, broken psyche, and from distorting it even more through your writing; or probably trying to straighten it out forcibly. That’s a process that requires some sort of mental instability and the daring recklessness of somebody who is (or feels he is) beyound saving. I’m thinking that many, many people have been writing this way all their lives. I happened to fix myself somewhere along the way.
And the other cardinal position from where to write is when you have found the inner status quo that doesn’t even require your proving it to be correct. You have found a place where you belong, you have found the life that is as good as you can hope it to be, you have found your own moral code and philosophical backing, or your personal religion, and there are very little fights to be fought over that place because you know it is of your own, and you don’t need anybody’s approval for it.
Of course, as with all cardinal theories, every writer is somewhere in the middle. I know now that for me, being closer to my inner temple works way better than being closer to my inner abyss. At least as long as I don’t intend to write from a padded cell.
So yeah, 300+ words done today on a story I dropped a long, long time ago because I couldn’t fix it. Now I think I can. And there’s this long, savory feeling of writing where I write a paragraph that doesn’t necessarily say anything much, nor is ostensibly important, but draws another facet of the story world, of the protagonist, and is simply wonderful to write.
