11/24/2024
Writing Through Depression
This is number eighty-eight in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I CAN’T TELL YOU how many people have spoken to me after reading one of my books or stories and have said some variation of, “I can see this was a very autobiographical book. It’s really about you.”
Really? Let me just run down a list of characters people have thought were really me.
G2 in The Volunteer. My older sister actually accused me of lying about our father. I had to explain carefully that the character in question wasn’t our father, nor was the story about me.
Dag Hamar in For Blood or Money. Several friends and readers asked me if I was okay and if I was taking care of my heart. This was ten years before I had heart problems.
Brian Frost in Living Next Door to Heaven. “But you lived in northern Indiana and you had a paper route.” I wish I had the harem, too! Or even a few friends like those in that series.
Nate Hart in Full Frame and the “Picture Perfect” series. Well, I might have patterned Nate after what I wished my life was like growing up. There’s certainly more of me in the early volumes than in the later ones.
Dennis Enders in Team Manager SWISH! Nearly blind undersized geek with a great talent for basketball and coaching. Me? Really?
Keith Drucker in The Gutenberg Rubric. “I knew as soon as I read it, you were the only person in the world who could have written this. I could just see you examining manuscripts,” said a former work associate.
Wayne Hamel in The Props Master 1: Ritual Reality. Events bear a striking resemblance to some of the things I witnessed in college, but Wayne and me? Worlds apart.
And many others.
In fact, my writing is probably more a reflection of my mental state than my actual life. And I find I am most productive in my writing when I am most profoundly depressed.
When I wrote Mural in 2012, originally just called “Model Student” because I had no idea it would grow into several books, I was incredibly depressed. Though depression doesn’t need a ‘because,’ I had several good reasons to be depressed. I was laid off a few months before my 60th birthday and for the first time in my life I was unemployed and couldn’t find a job. In fact, my success in previous jobs was a detriment to finding a new one, especially one that would pay less than half what I had been earning.
Coupled with that, I heard those crushing words from my wife: “I know you try hard, but I’m just not interested.” Not interested in sex? I could understand, sort of. Not interested in me, in our relationship, in our home… That was what drew me deeper into depression, anger, and bitterness.
I started writing about an art student who was chronically depressed. His symptoms included being unable to focus long enough to get assignments done and being so focused on an art project that he forgot about everything else until it was too late. And, above all, his feelings of isolation.
No. It wasn’t about me. I was depressed, but I was functioning. On the other hand, my daughter started attending a prestigious art school and became so depressed she was physically incapacitated. I literally picked her up off her dorm room floor and carried her to an emergency room! If anything, Tony Ames was based on her, not on me.
But I found I could truly relate to Tony’s recurring depression, even when things seemed to be going right. I refused to take the easy route out that many authors (especially of erotica) use: Tony has sex and suddenly his depression is cured. It just doesn’t fucking work that way!
In exploring Tony’s depression, I came to understand my own much better. It wasn’t because I lost my job and my marriage. It was truly a part of who I am.
Mural and the entire “Model Student” series are available as individual eBooks or a collection on Bookapy. Paperbacks are still available online.
Everyone does it. Perhaps it will help you in your own writing to know some of the famous writers who were chronically depressed.
Papa Hemingway, who wrote in A Farewell to Arms, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Or as Nietzsche famously put it: “What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.” Sadly, it killed Hemingway.
Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Styron, Hunter S. Thompson, Edgar Allen Poe, Tolstoy and nearly every other Russian author in history. They all wrote through depression.
And so did/do I.
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t write for a living; I write to live. I appreciate the good intentions of some readers who will excuse a mistake I’ve made by saying “He’s not a professional writer.” I wonder sometimes what it takes if 70 books and several thousand sales doesn’t make me a professional writer! Thanks anyway.
The thing is that writing allows the author to vent. Without writing a true confession, the author can put the words of his own frustration in the mouths of his characters. They don’t even need to be characters he likes! They are just a vehicle for his own frustration.
Writing also allows the author to explore various alternatives. If I wasn’t depressed, how would I feel? Oh! Manic! That’s good. After an author has explored sadness, devotion, anger, frustration, lethargy, and ennui, he might eventually get around to exploring happiness. What would it be like to be happy? The hypothetical author, however, will quickly find that happiness and depression are not mutually exclusive.
Let that sink in.
Writing lets the author try on different personalities—even different economic and social classes, genders, orientations, levels of intelligence and wit, athletic ability, and artistic temperament. In writing characters with those characteristics, the author might actually stumble on the one that truly fits him.
Writing challenges the author to actually do something. Anything. I started doing November Noveling back in 2004 because it was an opportunity to explore what being a writer was really like while I was briefly unemployed. I only had to commit to it for 30 days. I could do that. My family could live with that. It was only 30 days. In fact, it was broken down even further. All I was committed to was 1,666 words per day. And if I only got one word written, it was a victory. It was more than I started with.
I don’t hold up writing as being a cure for depression. I believe writing is one use you can put your depression to. Turn the tables on it and embrace the creative stimulus it provides.
Just as I wouldn’t let Tony simply have sex and be cured of his depression in Mural, I’m not going to leave this post with a happy ending that shows everything is all better now that I’m writing. And yes, everything in this post applies to writing erotica as well as anything else. What a great escape it is to write a sex scene in which you don’t actually need to be concerned about your partner’s experience. He is by default happy. She comes when you do. Always wet, always hard, always ready. Until you finish the scene.
But there’s a lot more to this subject and I’ll be writing more about it soon.
What else do Papa Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, Sylvia Plath, and Abbie Hoffman have in common? I’ll leave that answer till next week: “Writing Through Despair.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
