The inability to whistle

It seemed so sim­ple, at the time. Let’s hop into the way­back machine and go back to just before Hal­loween, 2007.

I was in a funk, for sev­eral rea­sons. Part of it, I’m cha­grined to say, was about a girl. Part of it was out of whack lev­els of sero­tonin and dopamine in by brain. And part of it was a deep uncer­tainty about writ­ing. I knew I could write, but it had lost all fun, all fla­vor, for me. I was torn between sev­eral projects, intim­i­dated by the idea of blog­ging about them as I wrote, resent­ful of my writer’s cri­tique group, and just gen­er­ally out of sorts about writ­ing. I was no longer con­vinced that a pas­sion for sto­ries and the abil­ity to write was enough to make a writer.

So, in keep­ing with a sacred tra­di­tion of ambiva­lent writ­ers going back to Plato, I went to a SciFi con­ven­tion. Mile Hi Con, a lit­tle local thing they do every year in Den­ver. The big ses­sion of the day was with David Weber, and I was look­ing for­ward to it. I love his Honor Har­ring­ton series and wanted to grill him about my writerly con­cerns. I sat through the open­ing stuff and waited patiently for him to start tak­ing ques­tions. When he did, I got called on.

“Before you had book con­tracts and oblig­a­tions,” I asked, “did you ever think about just giv­ing up on writ­ing and doing some­thing else?” I wanted to know if my wishy-​washiness was a nor­mal part of the process.

In ret­ro­spect, he gave me exactly the answer I should have expected from a pro­lific, pub­lish­ing writer, the same answer I’d have got­ten from Isaac Asi­mov or Stephen King. No, he never thought about it. Weber has been mak­ing a liv­ing from the writ­ten word in one way or another (he wrote a lot of ad copy before Baen signed him) since his was six­teen. He’s never had any doubts.

Well, crap, I thought. That’s no gor­ram help at all.

I wan­dered around the con for a few more hours, bounc­ing back and forth between two groups of friends who had showed up inde­pen­dently. Even­tu­ally I found my way to a tiny pre­sen­ta­tion room about 20 min­utes early for the next ses­sion, one on query let­ters. The folks from the pre­vi­ous pre­sen­ta­tion were still milling about in the empty room, among them a midlist SF writer named Hoyt and her hus­band (who iden­ti­fied him­self as an actual rocket sci­en­tist). We started chat­ting, just killing time, and I fig­ured, why not try them.

“Oh, yeah,” Mrs. Hoyt said. “I’ve tried to quit sev­eral times. Never sticks.” She and her hus­band explained that writ­ing is a hard trade with lit­tle to no reward and the only rea­son to do it all was if you couldn’t stop your­self. They passed on some advice on the same ques­tion once given by Orson Scott Card: If you can walk away (from writ­ing), walk away whistling.

It seemed so sim­ple, so free­ing. Just don’t be a writer. See if I can do other things. And for a while, it was free­ing. So free­ing that I quit a bunch of other habits, too. About that time I became increas­ingly frus­trated with the fail­ure of the Demo­c­ra­tic party to do any­thing to stand up to the now minor­ity Repub­li­cans, so I stopped fol­low­ing pol­i­tics and stopped lis­ten­ing to the Rachel Mad­dow Show on Air Amer­ica. Then I stopped lis­ten­ing to pod­casts at all. I didn’t stop fol­low­ing the mobile tech world, but I did stop actively par­tic­i­pat­ing in it. I stopped blog­ging and stopped post­ing on forums, only lurk­ing in silence. Now, I thought, I’ll have time to devote to other pur­suits.

As it turns out, aside from the afore­men­tioned girl, I have no other pur­suits. And as the month of Novem­ber drug on, I sank deeper and deeper into depres­sion got to the point where my close friends really started to worry about me. My par­tic­u­lar neu­ro­chem­i­cal imbal­ance man­i­fests itself mostly as Bipo­lar Dis­or­der (with notice­able splashes of OCD, ADD and anx­i­ety dis­or­der for fla­vor) and I started doing a text­book BPD behav­ior known as rapid cycling. I’d be mostly ratio­nal one day, then com­pletely bugshit emo­tional and out of con­trol the next, then back to nor­mal, then bugshit again, on a just about daily rhythm. It was spooky, and not just for me. I’d have to leave the room at work so I could go cry about…

See, that’s the thing, on this side of it, with my ratio­nal brain back in con­trol, I’m not really sure what all the fuss was about. I know I was in a lot of pain, and a lot of it was lone­li­ness and the fear that that I’d grow old and die alone, but while I can see now that it doesn’t have to be that way, and there’s things I can do to improve my life, at the time it really seemed hope­less, that there was no way out. It’s a good thing I no longer carry any­thing with me that can tear open a carotid artery, is what I’m say­ing.

I hit rock bot­tom around the end of the month, and it became clear that I couldn’t go on like that. And then it hap­pened, in the back of my mind, shout­ing to be heard over my bat­shit inter­nal mono­logue, I heard a voice. My voice. But not any­thing like the thoughts I’d been hav­ing. It was calm, ratio­nal, and most impor­tantly, full of prac­ti­cal sug­ges­tions on how I could change things so they wouldn’t hurt so much any­more. Over the course of a day or so, I started to lis­ten.

And one of the first things the voice (me, I get that, I’m not schiz­o­phrenic) told me was that I needed to start writ­ing again. That I can’t walk away whistling, I can’t even sur­vive very long with­out writ­ing. (It also told me to see a real psy­chi­a­trist instead of let­ting my GP pre­scribe brain drugs and to clean up my damn apart­ment already, among other things.) But when I start writ­ing, to write for me, no one else. Write for the story, not the audi­ence. I had become so caught up in thoughts of mar­ketabil­ity and pub­li­ca­tion that I’d for­got­ten about story, about the magic of telling a tale. I’d become so hide­bound about avoid­ing groans from my writer’s cri­tique group that I dreaded sit­ting down to write.

I won’t make those mis­takes this time (I’ll make com­pletely new mis­takes, but I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it). This time around I’m approach­ing writ­ing not as a soon-​to-​be-​bestselling-​author prac­tic­ing his craft, but as a reg­u­lar per­son with a hobby. A hobby I don’t seem to be able to walk away from, a hobby I might just need to keep my san­ity, but a hobby nonethe­less. Once I’m done writ­ing a book, and only then, I might think about shop­ping it around for pub­li­ca­tion. Maybe. But the writ­ing, that’s for me.

And to keep that bat­shit nut­bag in my head down to a dull roar.