madness and the writer

Writers are prone to madness, at least to bouts of madness. Often whole books can be written whilst the author is in the grip of something else, some weird and alien state of mind quite unlike his normal operating self.

I get mad, ie. angry, on an embarrassingly frequent basis. I go mad, too, when I am over concentrating on work. That’s the warning sign: when work seems both impossible and tremendously important. That’s when you have to kick back and have a cup of coffee and a digestive biscuit – except you don’t. You plough on with red rimmed mad eyes doing work that you’ll probably end up ripping up anyway. You can be mad for days and not know it. Other’s do. They shy away and you feel how hard it is just to make contact. There may be brief periods of normality, humour, a relaxed air of not caring too much but being involved at the same time. Then bang- you’re back- obsessed with something, dithering, thinking your life is shit, making plans at a furious rate.

Reach for the digestive biscuits. Or whatever your drug of choice has become.

Next…what? I am as big a fool as the next man when I am mad. Sanity seems to be as much about being able to flip out of mad phases as having some special and enviable mental state all the time. And public admissions of folly do no good anyway, they only attract the victimizer latent even in the kindest of souls.

The thing to remember is: the less mad you are the better and faster you work. When you are mad you feel like you’re working fast but actually you are just skimming quickly. Lots gets missed and you have to keep going back again and again to make corrections. Often a kind of thinness remains.  When you are not mad you get stuck in without getting stuck. You do your work and then take a well earned break. The absence of well earned breaks is another nice shove in the direction of madness.

Even very cool, interesting and together people can go mad. Seen it several times.

It has for me its root cause in insecurity about work. For others it may reside in relationship insecurity but for me its all about work. If work is going great the world is a fine and dandy place. Knowing this I should pursue work that ‘goes great’ without too much extreme effort. Or at least I can see what and where to apply the effort. Yet I always pursue projects that are virtually impossible. It’s a kind of greed. Settle for more of what is doable rather than less of what isn’t.