Monday, November 28, 2005

Keep me away from the DSM - IV

That's the manual the shrinks use to diagnose mental illness. I am currently manifesting the symptoms of several major illnesses due to this novel I have been working on for the last almost three years and I am way prone to self-diagnosis. (Keep me away from those magazine quizzes, too. You know the ones -- "Could you be ready to drop dead and not even know it?") I always end up thinking I have something bad.

Novel writing stirs my insecurities so that the dreck comes up from the bottom and gunks up my brain. Head: "I can't do this. I can't believe I even thought I could do this. Look at all the problems I have to fix before I can even show this to anyone."

Then if it goes well, as it has once or twice in the last two weeks, it's "What should I wear on Leno?" or "How quickly does Graywolf respond to queries?"

Is that called emotional lability?

John Gardner says in On Becoming a Novelist you have to be somewhat nuts to be a writer and he lists out the qualities of not insanity, but dare I paraphrase, of lesser sanity necessary for success. I sure hope this is true. It would be nice to get something good out of being as weird as I feel sometimes.

I'm at 164 pages and counting. I need to straighten out some serious fact problems (like it's set in the '80s but at the end of the book the protag sends e-mail -- duh!), write in some important stuff I left out, re-work a bunch of scenes, write some entirely new scenes, and then, maybe, I'll put it up in a Zoe office.

2 comments:

Patry Francis said...

Sounds like your well on your way. Thanks for reminding me of Gardner's definition of a writer. So true!

Stephanie said...

I have to stay away from the online defitions from the DSM-IV. But sadly I don't diagnose myself (I already know my own diagnoses), I diagnose others!