Writing is mental
Olivia Collard
(she/they)
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Writing is, inherently, a very odd thing to do.
We writing folk tend to flock together like insecure flamingos, hovering awkwardly over our eggs while we make small talk about yoga, secretly certain that the egg we’re nurturing is rotten or evil or has far too many legs, and all the other flamingos will have perfect fluffy hatchlings that win the Branford Bose. Was that too meta?
Much as these writerly gatherings make each of us exponentially more anxious, they are actually essential. Writing is a weird, lonely job. You sit at home (or wherever you lay your eggs) for hours at a time, hallucinating vividly, while trying to make your hallucinations comprehensible and interesting to people who do not live inside your brain. My partner gets home from her job as a store manager and asks how my day has gone, to which I respond, ‘Yes, quite good actually, I’ve made a breakthrough. Realised Jemima should have been wearing pyjamas this whole time, otherwise she won’t fit in at all at the Penguin Ball.’ I receive a concerned smile, a noncommittal throat gurgle, and we move onto something else.
That’s where the other flamingos come in.
You can say something absolutely bananas to another writer, and they can give you notes on whether that’s a good idea for your story. You can spend an hour in their world, getting excited, helping them join up the dots in their plot, then jump back into yours with someone who hasn’t spent the last four hours bouncing ideas off a grapefruit. Who can use their fresh writery eyes to tell you that actually whether or not Jemima is in pyjamas, it’s more important that she befriend a wayward penguin to reach the ball in the first place.
It’s hard, at first. I think there are very few creatives about that have never experienced poor mental health. Especially during a very long pandemic in which we’ve all really had to get used to our own company. Our brains can be mean, treacherous things. They tell us our ideas are stupid, no one will ever care to read them, and by extension, they will never care about us. Which is a pretty intense way to feel your job. The weird thing is we all secretly also think our ideas are flipping brilliant, otherwise we’d never dare to share them. We go to our little (online) meetings featuring other people’s cats, pretty smugly sure we’ve created something fantastic, then immediately crumble as soon as someone says something that could be deemed a critique.
Your ego has to take a few hits before you realise that maybe these other flamingos are here to help you, and that maybe what you wrote on a bad mental health day during the Darkest Pandemic was a little macabre for a chapter book. Maybe Jemima didn’t need to explore suicidal idiation in the Jungle of Trauma. Didn't really “fit the narrative.” The more time you spend with these other flamingos, Marie Kondo-ing your story, the better it becomes. The better you become. And less lonely, too. Eventually your egg hatches. It’s not perfect, it’s a bit sticky and can’t walk right away, but it has all the right bits and it’s fluffy and it’s yours.
Us weirdos need each other.
It takes a village, after all.