On Giving Up on Fiction Writing
Filed Under: My Writing, personal
I’ve been talking about this in private for a while now, but I’ve decided to talk about it publically. There’s a lot of information out there about how to start writing, but there’s not a lot written about how to stop. Sorry if you’ve heard some of this before.
I’ve been struggling with writing since my father’s death a few years ago. His death was followed by his brother, then his mother, then both of my mother’s parents within a year. Around the same time, my little sister’s health problems became significant enough that she needed a kidney transplant. Our family was put through the wringer, and I did not come out of it okay.
Early last year, my occasional panic attack problem turned into a daily panic attack problem. Eating anything made me feel sick, and feeling sick felt like dying, and then I really lost it. I tried to get help via my medical doctor, but they were afraid to prescribe a high enough dose of anything to help me. I finally gave up and went to a psychiatrist who quadrupled the medication and finally started getting my attacks under control. The panic attacks had gone on for so long that I had lost over 50 pounds. After getting medication working to control the attacks, I continued to lose weight. Recently, to my dismay I’ve started to regain some, but that’s a topic for another post.
So it wasn’t until last year that mentally I was starting to come back together. Prior to my father’s illness, I was pretty solid. I was enthusiastic and I was very productive as a writer. I hated Laramie, but living there motivated me somehow to write 1-3 short stories a week. It was a wonderful outlet, and I learned a lot in my time there and started making my first few big sales.
So come the bad times of the last few years, my production ground to a halt. I had been working on a novel loosely based on my father’s childhood in Kansas in the 70s called Prince Starling when he called to tell me he had cancer. I think the coincidence here damaged me in some fundamental way inside regarding writing. It broke some connection I had to my creative spirit. The monkey deep inside somehow decided, ridiculously, that by having used my father’s stories that way, it was some how responsible for his illness.
I wrote some while he struggled with it. I really didn’t believe he was dying until he was in hospice, because he did such a good job of pretending he was going to beat it. I will always react with suspicion to claims of recovery from cancer now. But I believed because I wanted to believe and I had to believe.
Now, in the last six months, I was laid off from a horrible job and after a couple of months of terrifying freelance scurrying, I got my best job yet with a new company. I work from home, I have tremendous creative freedom, and I get to work with cutting edge web technologies. The only downside is that it’s pretty time consuming and it leaves me more mentally drained at the end of the day than I have ever been.
Rather than fight it, I’ve decided to just go with it. The job is great, but it takes enough from me that I find writing to be far too difficult to manage at this time. Roundbottom takes up a considerable chunk of my free time and I find it mostly very creatively fulfilling. I certainly won’t run that site and project for the rest of my life, but I could get several years out of it for sure.
I love the idea of writing. I love writing ideas. But lately, the struggles to keep my life afloat have left me with little energy to deal with the fight of publishing.
Truth is, I am still pretty emotionally sensitive. I was much thicker-skinned before all this, but negative reviews literally send me into stupid tears. Rejections sometimes as well. My one and only Clarkesworld rejection confirmed my worst fears about my inabilities and I nearly made the decision there to give up on writing permanently. I do not have what it takes to shrug off rejection very well. Perhaps its because I have deep personal issues iwth the subject of rejection or something. Either case, I can’t seem to make it not bothering me, so when I’m doing it, it’s a major source of pain for me.
So to recap, personal issues, struggle with time and energy, plus inability to handle rejection (all adding up to what is probably a lack of motivation)–these are the reasons I have decided to set aside my pursuit of a side-career as a fiction writer, at least until I have a better grip on the basics of a life, a family, and a job.
I hope those of you who are my writer and editor friends won’t drift away because I’m not writing. I will be more than happy to read stuff for people. I will not be giving up reading, and talking about SF. Just putting any real story words out myself, except for the weekly Roundbottom schedule stuff which is not insignificant.
I don’t consider this a permanent retirement. It’s still a passion of mine, and I hope to return to it when I feel like it’s in me, maybe in a couple of years.
