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I, as a writer, am bi-polar. I add that caveat “as a writer” because in everyday life I’m not prone to great mood swings, I don’t take any medication; I am not clinically anything.
But as a writer – wait, let me expand on that – as a fiction writer, as opposed to my day job as a corporate shill, I am bi-polar. When I’m engrossed in crafting a new story, it’s a passionate obsession. I invent new dialogue while in the shower, I concoct plot twists while commuting, I spend all my free time ignoring my patient wife and scraping my nose against the screen of my laptop.
It’s exciting. As I’m writing a new book, I think my mind is giving birth to the next Pulitzer-Prize winning masterpiece. I think every burst of emotion is breathtaking, every revealing bit of character genius.
But once I’ve finish the book, my psyche gets whiplash from the sudden shift in mood. I’m happy, I’m inspired: BOOM, I recognize that my only accomplishment is wasting hundreds of pages on another unpolished junkfest. I become overcome with a great sense of hopelessness, and perhaps worst of all, I lose the motivation to write.
I find myself thinking I’ll give up fiction writing. I usually say that I write for fun, that it’s my hobby, but when I reach this stage of my bi-polar cycle, I can’t find any fun in it. I view the concept of trying to build interesting characters with unique viewpoints too daunting to ever want to attempt again. Character arcs, propulsive plots, internal conflicts; these are literary mountain peaks that I don’t have the intellectual tools necessary to climb. I just can’t do it.
I have ideas for other books, but I don’t have motivation to think them through, or to actually sit down and start writing one of them. I just can’t do it.
But then another mood swing will come, another pendulum shift that will send my mind soaring into the clouds of fictional invention, and I’ll be off writing again, ignoring my wife, rushing out of the shower with a wet towel wrapped around me to quickly jot down a new thought that changes the whole dynamic of my intended ending. And it will be exciting. And it will be fun.
The finished work will be junk, sure, but at least it will be fun, at least I’ll have my hobby back.
When that pendulum swings.
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