A Writer’s Lament

Let me preface this by saying that I like to think of myself as a fairly relaxed, pretty laid back kind of guy. I don’t think I’ve ever been referred to as ‘moody’ and generally, I’ve got a sunny temperament, and I’ve never been able to maintain much of a difference between the inside and the outside, largely because I’ve not had many occasions in which I’ve had to pretend to be happy.

I’ve always been able to lose myself in the moment, whether its the book, the movie, the show, the music, or the company in which I’m immersing myself. And in these moments, my worries and my troubles (we all have a few) recede into the background, leaving me free to dive into pleasant waters.

This, perhaps, has come to bite me, just a little bit.

The process of writing, even for people who are supposedly good at injecting meaning into words, is not easy to describe. For me, writing is immersing myself into a vision, a reality, almost as if I step into another world, and the fact that I am the creator of this world becomes irrelevant. I’ll have music playing that puts me in the right mood. I might read through the previous continuity to remind me of the flow. Ultimately, it becomes a process in which I see things through the eyes of the characters I am writing, feel their emotions and resonate with the imagery that surrounds them.

And my writing has very often led into melancholy places.

Increasingly, I find myself emotionally and mentally drained after writing. Yesterday’s work on Genesis was a case in point. It put me in such a strange, black mood, and it took several hours for me to recover my normal mental buoyancy.

I didn’t want to go back and read it over, I didn’t bother working through the first draft to make corrections. Simply couldn’t muster the energy. Reading it now is a different experience, and altogether a more pleasant one, but the writing of it, and many other pieces, is difficult.

I wonder if this is the way it is for many writers, or whether it’s a problem unique to my perspective.

When I was younger, and I’m still young – I know, I could write for hours at a time. The writing wasn’t as good, the drama was overblown (some would suggest it still is), the prose was unpalatable. But it was easy, and the quality of my work doesn’t make it more difficult to write. It’s not easy anymore.

Vaguely, this troubles me.

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