THE DOCTOR IS IN

ON NOT WRITING, SERIOUSLY

Recently a novelist friend asked me what I'm writing right now. "Not much, actually," I told her. "I've started two stories, but I haven't worked on either for months, and I keep researching that novel but I'm nowhere near even outlining it yet." She inquired sympathetically about possible blocks.

I'm not blocked, I told her. I just haven't had the time to immerse myself the way I need to do in the beginning stages of fiction.

She started a good-natured lecture on taking my own medicine, on making the time to write by setting "office hours" and page-per-week goals.

I think my response shocked her a bit. It would have shocked me a year ago.

I said, "I don't want to."

And I don't. I want to write, but at the moment I want more to just live.

Several months ago, I had another brush with serious illness--this one, seemingly, more ominous than the previous one, for a number of reasons. I'm doing very well, and there is every reason to believe I will continue to--but for a while, it looked like the story would have a distinctily unhappy ending. And during the time before I got my reprieve (temporary, as they all are), I did a lot of thinking about roads taken and not taken; about the shape, tone, and quality of my life--about my personal plot and themes.

When it turned out that I was going to live after all, I promised myself to live more fully than I'd been doing--to take my purgatorial ruminations seriously, and act in ways that would minimize regrets at the true end of the story.

I have posted here about my phobia therapy, sparked by my desire to share the exploits of my aspiring-aviator son. What I didn't say is that I had a pressing ambition to accomplish all this sooner rather than later.

Last week I went up in a helicopter.

I have been busy on other fronts. In addition to my bill-paying work, I have stepped up my volunteer work--because it is important to me. I have said "yes" to a number of challenging opportunities, and grown as a result of pursuing them. A dear friend is also coping with some scary issues, and we have become deeply involved in each other's care and support. My son is preparing to graduate from the eighth grade. All of this is time-consuming, and sometimes exhausting. And I wouldn't miss it for anything--not even a juicy book contract.

Things are settling down. I am almost ready to pick up those stories again. But I don't feel as though I've been blocked, or procrastinating, or wasting my time. I have been living my life, and becoming, I hope, more fully the person I was meant to be--not "a writer" or "a psychologist" or "a mother," though those are all important aspects of who I am--but a full, and realized, human being.

Another writer once observed of a poet whose output is impressive in quality, but sparse in quantity, "It's a shame--he could have made something of himself if he wasn't such a dilettante." I don't know this poet but I have to wonder whether his time spent not writing is when he does "make something of himself."

"Well," my novelist friend observed, "at least you're collecting material."

That may be so, but it's not the point. I'm not taking notes for future projects. I'm doing my best to engage with each new experience, in the moment, as it unfolds. For myself. That attitude may brand me as a dilettante--in writing. In life? I'm dead serious. Alive serious. Alive.

I will be on vacation for two weeks, returning July 18. Please continue to send questions, comments, and life experiences to dr.sue AT mindspring DOT com--I'll check in sporadically, and see you all in a few weeks.

Susan O'Doherty, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with a New York City-based practice. A fiction writer herself, she specializes in issues affecting writers and other creative artists. Her book,  Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity (Seal, 2007) is now available in bookstores. Send your questions to her at Dr.Sue at mindspring dot com.    

Comments

[Sarah]

Thanks Sue, for this post. I think I became a better writer when I moved toward living a more integrated life and stopped being impatient with "life" getting in the way of writing- and ironically, I also began writing more. I remember a fellow writer saying once "I'd die if I couldn't write," which struck me as one of the most ridiculous things I'd ever heard.

[Alex]

A lot of new, young literary writers stop living when they start writing; that's why so many first novels are thinly-disguised autobiography, and why so many second novels tank. I applaud your decision to reprioritize, and like you, I think your writing will ultimately be richer for it.

[Warren Adler]

This calls to mind the tale of Dow Mossman who wrote one book, THE STONES OF SUMMER, which was well reviewed in the NEW YORK TIMES many years ago. Dow was never heard from again as a novelist. It is as if the creation of his one novel was his supreme achievement. Everything else became a cropper. He was not a failed novelist, a cliché much abused, but a failed man. There is a hint that the enormous energy required to write his first and only novel, the process of editorial changes demanded by his publishers, and their subsequent failure to find readers, exhausted and discouraged him and induced what he admits was a massive case of writer's block. Certainly, there are one-novel authors who have not shared his fate, but there is compelling evidence that the novelist's life is fraught with psychological dangers. Why, for example, have some of our writing icons met such tragic fates? Fitzgerald dies of alcoholism at forty-four. Hemingway blows his brains out at sixty. Faulkner falls off his horse in a drunken stupor at 65. Jack London commits suicide at forty. Twain dies bitter and alone. On and on…

[Sandra Gulland]

Sue, that's a very moving post. Living is what it's all about.

[Susan O'Doherty]

Thanks so much for the backup & insights, Sarah, Alex, and Sandra!

Warren, you raise an interesting point/question--is it that the life of a writer is fraught with psychological danger, or that, for at least some of us, some unhappiness compels us to write in the first place?

I don't have an answer--just lots of food for thought.