The Writing Escape

It was one of the lowest points of my life. My career was in tatters and I was in a job that I hated. I felt like a total failure. Then I had a herniated spinal disc that required emergency surgery. I’ve since learned that anesthesia, or maybe it’s the trauma of surgery itself, causes me to become severely depressed. After surgery, I recovered well physically but emotionally I was spiraling down. I grew so hopeless and despairing I contemplated suicide. Two things stopped me:  I had two young children I knew I couldn’t abandon. And I realized I didn’t want to die because I hadn’t written a novel.

That revelation got me writing fiction. My first project was a historical family saga that I had neither the skill nor the perspective to write. A year later, I started working in a library and discovered popular fiction, and more specifically, historical romance. I began a new story and got utterly hooked on the writing process. I finished the book, and encouraged by one of my co-workers, started to submit to publishers. Another year later, with the contacts I made at my first Colorado Gold conference, I ended up with a three-book publishing contract.

My writing career unfolded like a Cinderella story…until it didn’t. After eight years of publishing success, the next ones were filled with rejections, failed career changes, indifferent agents and editors and finally, a bumpy and not altogether satisfying journey into self-publishing and small presses. What got me through through the collapse of my expectations for writing was, ultimately, writing. Despite all the discouragement and struggle, the act of creating stories has continue to fulfill and excite me and kept me going. In addition to helping me deal with my writing career struggles, writing also sustained me through numerous personal and family health crises, traumas and deaths.

I used to believe that the process of writing changed my brain and somehow made it more resilient, and that’s what allows me to cope and be more positive. But I now think it isn’t the process itself but what writing fiction offers—an escape from real life.

There are other ways to get out of my own head:  books and TV shows, music, gardening, travel, and lately, spending time with my grandchildren. But none of those activities offer me sustained relief from the problematic real-life narrative spinning through my brain. Only writing fiction immerses me so fully in another world that I truly forget the real one. Once I’m well into a book, it inhabits my consciousness. I think about the story before I go to sleep, when I wake up and sometimes even in my dreams. My characters’ world becomes my alternate reality.

For me, writing fiction is therapeutic and healing. If I go through a period where I don’t have the time or energy to immerse myself in a story, my mood and perspective start to decline. Even if I’m struggling with my writing—there’s a plot point I can’t work out or my characters refuse to do what I want them to—being intensely involved with a story still aids me. Part of the effect is that, unlike real life, in writing I mostly control things. But even what I can’t control, struggles with plotting and characters, doesn’t seem to interfere with the relief that writing offers me.

I’m not saying that writing can overcome everything. It can’t, unfortunately, transform me from being a person prone to anxiety and depression into a happy optimist. But it does reliably help me cope with life. I think of it as a very important part of the toolbox of things that aid my mental health.

The only time writing has failed me is when I allowed career expectations and obligations to control what and how I wrote. I discovered that making myself write what I should write, rather than following my muse, is very risky. If writing becomes a job instead of a creative journey, the joy is sapped out of writing and the mental health benefits are nullified. But as long as I allow the writing to flow naturally, and the process to be an escape from real life, it has never failed to improve my outlook.

Mary Gillgannon