Write depressed, edit happy
On writing from inside a tunnel.
I set up my first proper writing space when I was around 11 – a small dressing table I decided that, actually, would be a desk.
I was feeling pretty grown up about starting secondary school after the summer, so made the conscious decision that my ‘desk’ would most certainly not be a place for drawing suns with orange and yellow felt-tips, nor for carving out my initials on my Forever Friends pencil tin (if you know, you know).
Instead, I saw it as a place to write my stories and read What Katy Did or The Witches while making a point of absolutely not leaning back childishly on my new desk chair.
On the days my kamikaze-alcoholic dad locked me in my room without food or water, I wrote with fear and desperation. I wrote from within a dark tunnel I often find myself back in as a real-life-responsible-for-many-things grown up.
It was Ernest Hemingway who advised us: ‘Write drunk, edit sober.’ Despite issues I have with elements of Hemingway’s character — and alcoholic fathers aside — from my experience, this is not altogether bad advice. There has to be a balance, of course:
‘Write shit-faced, edit hungover,’ Hemingway did not say.
The idea is that you write a draft freely, uninhibited from any critical reader, particularly those who live on the left side of your brain or in the bigger house with more garden next to yours. Then, when you’ve bled all over the page (another of Hemingway’s charming quotes), you edit with a keen and critical eye.
In this sober edit, you think about your intention and the theme of the piece. You write three words instead of 67 in paragraph five. You cut rants about your ex, clean up any unprocessed word vomit. You may even give a fleeting thought as to what your poor reader might be feeling.
Where depression comes in
If you’ve ever experienced the darkness of depression, on whatever scale, it might help to know that I’ve long found the apparently meaningless tunnel of depression quite a fruitful place from which to write.
In the same way Hemingway advises to write drunk, I find the unwelcome arrival of depression gives my writing a raw edge I don’t have when it eventually leaves (often in the dead of night).
Please know this: I do not subscribe to the notion that writers have to suffer for their art. I don’t hope to romanticise mental ill health in any way; I wouldn’t wish my worst enemy (Piers Morgan, if you must know) be sucked into that tunnel of doom.
It’s the relationship between trauma, depression, healing and creativity that interests me.
I’m not asking: ‘Does depression make me a better writer?’ My question is more: ‘Can I use depression when it does arrive?’
To put it bluntly, when I’m depressed I don’t give a shit. And when I don’t give a shit I have nothing to lose. And when I have nothing to lose, I can write about anything – and in any way the words decide to come out of me.
And oh my, does that feel good.
Feeling raw like this allows me a creative freedom I find hard to access at other times. That honesty was there in my teenage stories and diaries (which I burned in my 20s lest ANYONE SHOULD EVER READ THEM). It’s there in my adult years in the journal entries, stories and poems I jot down.
What to do with all these raw words?
If I don’t want to publish my depression-sourced writing, I’ll go back to it when the depression has lifted (if I haven’t already burned it to the ground).
I read back my words eagerly because I want to reach out and touch something that raw. Most of us do. It’s both comforting and shocking to get a taste of that brutal, seething honesty.
If I do want to publish what I’ve written, I’ll wait until I have that clearer, sober mind to edit with. This is when I cut any slander and the stuff that’s screaming out from the page for me to write and/or speak to my therapist more before I unleash it on the world. I’ll (try to) keep only what the piece needs to survive and say its bit.
I often think about that kid, locked in her room writing with fear and desperation, and I want to tell her: ‘Keep writing little one. Write it all down.’ One day you’ll learn that this pain you’re pouring out has a purpose beyond survival. One day you’ll realise it’s a way of transforming the worst parts of your story into something that might help someone breathe a little easier from inside their own tunnel.
And so, I keep writing.