The good news is that my husband is better. After making
very slow, two-steps-forward-and-one back progress for nine months, his
eventual recovery was sudden; almost overnight it was as though he was here
again after a long absence. For a while, I just basked in the joy of having him
back. Anxiety and depression are dreadful for those who endure them – I don’t
even pretend to know what it is like, though I did a lot of studying to help me
understand Jon’s plight better. However, living with someone who is suffering
takes its own toll. For the long months of Jon’s illness, I think I lived on
adrenaline: researching the subject, buying books, seeing a counsellor to help
me cope better and coming up with endless strategies to try to aid Jon’s
recovery. I grasped on to need to economise because of our cut in income and
became absurdly gung ho about that; here at least was something I could do. The
problem with anxiety and depression is that healing takes time; in the meantime
there is not really a lot you can do to improve the situation. You just need to
find a way to endure it – and my way was constant, frustrated, adrenaline-fed
effort.
The thing about adrenaline is that once it is not needed any
more, it drains away, and this can leave you feeling very flat. I experienced
this years ago when Jon was knocked off his bike by a car. While he was in
hospital with broken bones and a punctured lung, I was Mrs Coping Marvellously,
juggling hospital visits, work and caring for two young children. However, once
he was home, slowly recovering, panic over, I suddenly felt very low.
I think this is what is happening now. Jon is going from
strength to strength, rediscovering the joy of teaching and feeling confident and
optimistic about his abilities. Ironically, Mrs Coping Marvellously now feels
she is rather rubbish at everything. All marvellousness has flown. The first sign
was a massive slump in my confidence about writing. A few rejections for short
stories and poems I had sent off were enough to make me feel like giving up altogether.
The thought of writing a query letter for my novel, full of bouncy
self-confidence and marketing savvy, was too exhausting to even contemplate.
Writing itself became a chore.
What do you do in these circumstances? You keep going. One
word at a time. Keep thinking about your writing. Keep involved with it. Tell
yourself that feelings pass. Skills learned through years of hard work don’t
disappear overnight; confidence will return. Perhaps don’t undertake anything as
major as contacting agents or making big decisions about your writing when you
are feeling low. Just carry on being a writer until the creative spark, the
energy and the motivation return.
If you are a writer, the bad things in life are never wasted;
they give you that crucial edge of insight when you are creating the even worse
things that happen to your characters. This week, as part of a Lent course, I
was called upon to identify my ‘toolkit’ – those skills, gifts, attributes or
just character traits that allow me to benefit others in a way that is unique
to me. It wasn’t a great week for such positive thinking, and I was tempted to
put ‘I blessed my colleagues with my ability to remain mainly upright today’.
Then I thought of empathy. I always imagine how other people are feeling. Of
course this doesn’t mean I am always right, but it is habit of mind I have
always had: whatever happens, I wonder what other people feel about it. Thus if
something happens to upset a friend or colleague, I hope I’m there with a
listening ear to give them a sense that I hear them and validate their feelings
– which is all most of us want when we’re upset.
It is also empathy that makes me want to write. People
fascinate me. What makes them tick, what lies beneath the exterior, how do they
experience life? It is this inner life that I want to create, in a way that
readers recognise, believe and feel compelled to follow through to the end of
the story.
When life kicks you in the teeth, it gives you a unique
opportunity to experience what suffering feels like. Often those feelings are a
surprise. I understood, for instance, why Jon’s illness made me feel worried
for his safety, and insecure about our future. I hadn’t expected that it would
make me feel angry. I hadn’t expected to feel lonely, unloved and guilty.
It was when I was walking home from work, thinking about
empathy, that my mind drifted into thinking about the characters in my novel, Unspeakable Things, and it was my own
surprising feelings about the last nine months that informed several sudden new
insights into how these characters would feel. When I got home, I made some
notes, probably explicable only to me:
‘Make Jim scarier.
Churned up with anger he can’t explain over Sarah’s mood.’
‘Review bit where he
thinks the place has a different meaning for her. Give Jim more edge. ADD DRAMA’.
‘Sarah might feel
panic as her lack of knowledge dawns – why didn’t I ask? How could I not know
what she died of? Is there a secret? Is that why all the questions, odd
looks..?'
‘Clarify emotional
journey between Jim and Sarah, always with the seeds of his possible betrayal
of her, his feelings of anger, rejection and guilt as she drifts away.’
These notes address a structural issue in the novel: I need
to tweak and clarify a potential plot twist that should get readers excited. It
is a need I have identified before, and worked on, but that probably needs more
work. On that walk home, though, it was my own difficult feelings over Jon’s
illness that fed a reworking of my characters to make the dynamic between them
more believable. I know that as Sarah drifted into deep, internalised
obsession, Jim would feel angry and alone; that he wouldn’t understand the
feeling, and that he would feel guilty about it with a kind of self-loathing
and attempted repression that would only feed the explosive nature of his
anger. I’ve been there; that’s how I know.
No one, not even the most committed writer, wants the bad
stuff to happen. But when it does, eventually we can learn from it, and make
our writing more insightful, empathetic and believable as a result.
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