Why Writers Are Crazy (But Don’t Point and Stare)

Being a committed writer is the short road to insanity. Consider the writing process: The writer sits down at her desk with every intention to write. Scenes, ideas, phrases, moments, memories, and feelings are swirling through her mind. She knows that she needs to exorcise them, to dump them out onto the paper and rearrange them, and coax them, and polish and destroy them, until she reaches something that sounds true. She’s not sure yet what the final product will look like, but she’ll know it when she sees it.

In the meantime, she’s staring at the screen. At the sight of that white page, all her ideas run like cats from water to the deep crevices of her mind. They don’t want to leave—they’d prefer to stay up there and kick up the dust. They’ll come back out to play around 3am when, exhausted and unproductive, the writer will try to get some sleep.

As the writer feels her body relax and the calm of sleep come over her, something will pop into her mind. Yes! Of course! The protagonist is a metaphor for the city! (or some other such nonsense). She will reach over in the dark for her notebook, hitting every funny bone along the way and turn on the light. She scribbles the idea down, thinking, Finally! This is the key to getting started! She puts her notebook away and reclines on the pillow, finally ready to get some rest.

Oh, I’m sorry, says her brain, did you plan to sleep just now? Cause, I was really enjoying this little chat we had going. So, I’m going to continue hurling ideas around. I do hope that won’t keep you up.

It keeps her up. It becomes sleep deprivation. You know what’s another term for sleep deprivation? Psychological torture. Now, let’s imagine a few more nights of this.

Finally, the words come. They sputter and spurt and eventually, the writer gets into a rhythm. Maybe she rocks along at the keyboard looking like she’s playing a silent sonata. She may even look peaceful. But inside, she is going through whatever turmoil, whatever joy, and whatever pain she inflicts on her characters. In order to write them, she needs to feel them. And if this chapter is tragic and the next one is light-hearted, then she must drag herself out of the self-inflicted emotional storm (and you better believe she knows her own emotional triggers) and into the sunshine.

She falls in love with her characters. When she writes dialogue, she mutters the lines under her breath, listening to the sounds as they form on her lips and wonders, Would he say that? She gets up from her chair and pantomimes whatever motions her characters make so that she can describe them in vivid detail. Now she’s dancing, now she’s throwing a punch.

When she’s finally created something whole, she submits it for publication. This process of querying agents and literary magazines for publication is the highest act of self-loathing. Most agents and editors she writes to won’t care about the quality or content. They will care about her name, the length of the work, the passing trends, and whether the story makes a good elevator pitch. The writer gets used to their responses, the same thank you for sharing, I’m sorry it’s not right for us speech. She does it anyway. She scrapes together some amount of pleasure and satisfaction from the personal rejections: the ones from the editors that actually read her story all the way through, passed it around the office, and decided it came close, but not quite there.

She is a schizophrenic and an insomniac and a masochist. She has imaginary friends. But the thing, most of all, that makes the writer crazy, is that she knows the consequences of writing and does it anyway. But it’s not a real decision. She’d write no matter what.

Tatiana Sundeyeva has gotten into the terrible habit of thinking about everything. She enjoys travel, literature, puns, and anything that can be found in a bakery. And not necessarily in that order. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley where she got a degree in English with a minor in Italian.

 Tatiana Sundeyeva