Can being ill ever benefit your writing?

You may have noticed this blog has been quiet for a little while. It’s because I’ve been fighting with my body. Or, to be more precise, I’ve been learning not to fight my body.

At the end of last year, I ran into a wall. I had been pushing myself, the way I do. When it complained, I told my body to shut up and keep on going. This is what we are all so guilty of. We live in a society that says do it, have it, keep burning the candle at both ends. Face it, conquer it. Your body is your vehicle. Your body is your servant. Your body is not as important to you as your mind and soul. It is merely the container for those abstract, superior elements. Exhaustion is your default state – but that’s a good thing, isn’t it? It shows you’re putting in effort; in modern culture, striving and effort are gold badges of worth.

Then there comes the day when the body says ‘Enough’. It tells you, ‘I’ve had it with this attitude. I’ve had it with you not taking care of yourself. Of me.’

That rebellion can take the form of an exhaustion so draining there is no functionality left. Illness creates a fog in the mind. That questing, rational brain of yours can no longer dart about. It is lassoed from below and chained to a body that now asserts itself as having primacy.

Or a grumbling, niggling level of illness suddenly grows into something unmistakable. Something that fills the foreground of your awareness and stops you thinking of anything else. The body’s main weapon in this is pain. Pain makes you sit up and pay attention, like nothing else does or can.

This is what happened to me. Two health issues reached crisis point in December. I was told both required operations. One of those operations I have now had (the other isn’t so urgent). Three weeks on from the operation, I look back and take stock of it all. For weeks beforehand, virtually unable to eat and living with the fear of severe pain if I ate the wrong thing, my energy levels and my mental acuity both went through the floor. In the recovery phase, I have had to learn patience. Passivity. A willingness to wait. I am not good at those things!

Regular readers know I’m writing a book on mindset for writers. Oh, the irony! I had to live my own advice. I had to understand that I couldn’t push on with the book and publish as speedily as I had planned. Nor did I want to, once I had accepted the situation. Why? Because, quite simply, the book would not have been good enough. The book wouldn’t have been as rich and considered as I wanted it to be. There is pushing on, there is driving on – and there is the old proverb about more haste, less speed. I would add: more haste, poorer quality.

So how have I used the time of this health crisis? I have learned to sit and think, quietly. I have learned to doze and not feel guilty about that. I have learned to give my body time to rest and heal. It deserves that care and respect.

I am lucky enough to work mainly at home, but my new morning regime has involved staying in bed, reading and writing, in what I call ‘the bed office’. This has been amazingly productive in the last three weeks, as my brain revives and with it the enthusiasm and joy I feel about the book. It was not dead; it was merely sleeping.

I have written parts I would not have written had I not had this crisis. This is the creative paradox of it all.

If you are a writer and your health challenges you, either temporarily or continually, here are some recommendations I hope will help you:

·        Maintain awareness that you are not separate from your body.

·        Imagination is a wonderful thing but it can be two-edged in that we imagine the worst results from our symptoms (even without late-night Google searches!) However, remember that it’s your imagination that gives you the empathy to be a richer writer.

·        Try to turn resistance and resentment into acceptance. We use the ‘fighter’ image so often when it comes to illness, but it isn’t always the appropriate way to look at it.

·        If you can’t write, use the time to read and ponder – you are refilling the creative well.

·        Illness isn’t romantic. You’re not one of the Brontë sisters (and what they endured was pretty hellish). Illness isn’t pretty. But it is human and it brings out human kindness. Accept help from others even if you’re the stubbornly independent type.

·        Do what you can, not what you think you must. Do the minor things and don’t obsess about the central task you really can’t cope with right now.

·        If the work has worth, it won’t go away. It will wait for you. Have faith.

Interested in reading The Unputdownable Writer’s Mindset? Sign up here for advance news and sneak peeks in the run-up to publication.

I am really excited to be talking about mindset during the Women in Publishing online summit March 2-8 2020! Grab your free pass here. This gives you 24 hour access to an incredible range of talks and presentations on all aspects of writing and publishing. Or you can upgrade to the Full Access pass at an early bird rate before March 1.

Moonstruck: meeting Buzz Aldrin

Three years ago, I met one of the men who walked on the moon. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Go out this evening and look up. The moon is a symbol of change: a few nights ago it glowed red as our planet cast its shadow on it during a lunar eclipse. It can glow pale silver, it can be dark grey. It can be a sphere, a semi-circle, a sliver – and it can disappear entirely. We cast it in the role of goddess of love and inspiration, haunter of our nightmares, presider over inspired madness. The moon visits us – but half a century ago, we visited it. Humankind, the lover of this mistress of our imaginations, came calling.

So, in honour of that, here’s the post I wrote about the time I met Buzz Aldrin (from my previous blog, Literascribe, in June 2016).

‘I’m sitting in the gallery of the Sheldonian Theatre, one of the most beautiful if not one of the most comfortable venues in Oxford. Looking down across the packed floor, I see a tanned face and a white beard through the glass of a side door. Moments later, in he comes, wearing a beige blouson jacket with embroidered badges on it. He waves like a king and air-punches like a prize-fighter as he makes his way through the applauding crowd.

He’s Buzz Aldrin.

His sassy, witty ‘Mission Director’ Christina Korb conducts the interview, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, but she has trouble managing the blurted reminiscences and anecdotes. The man is bursting with things to tell us. He’s opinionated, forceful, waving be-ringed hands, talking about the Omega watch he wore on the outside of his spacesuit because it’s kinda hard to see the time otherwise.

I read Andrew Smith’s fascinating book Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth several years ago, struck by the poignant reason for its composition. At that time, only nine men were still alive who had walked on the surface of the moon, so he set about interviewing them while he could.

Well, there’s fewer than nine now. That is why several hundred people have queued in the chill rain outside and will later queue for the best part of an hour to get their books signed. I’m one of them. For a moment, we’re in contact with history, with what now seems a lost idealistic era. I grew up with the sense that space held all potential. I’d read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian and Venusian series. I’d read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. The stars, the planets and the dear old moon itself held out dreams of adventure and fulfilment.

So tonight we lap up the bombast and the showboating, enjoy the clearly oft-repeated wisecracks, the whole display of it all, because although this man is 86 now he is more alive than most we’ll ever meet and this man walked on the moon! He wears a t-shirt saying ‘Get your ass to Mars’ and is passionate about sending humans there, saying that a human can do in a week what took Spirit and Rover five years. He describes his spacewalk, saying he ‘wanted to putt putt putt around like George Clooney in Gravity.’ He says yes, the Russians put Sputnik up there but ‘if you put up a dumb satellite you don’t give it a parade and everybody loves a parade!’ What’s more, they put a dog in orbit and left it there – ‘at least we brought our monkey back.’ He expresses regret at the loss of Neil Armstrong. He talks of his family and his sense of destiny: his mother was Marion Moon and his father knew the Wright brothers. Yup, it was all meant.

When I eventually reach the head of the queue and he signs my copy of No Dream is Too High, I burble something about looking up at the moon from a Scottish garden when I was a little girl, amazed to think he was up there. ‘My mother came from Edinboro…’ he smiles and I pass on, past the selfie-taking crowd. Outside the Sheldonian I wish the clouds would part and I could see the old man’s stamping ground.

I remember another night, years ago, when I looked at the moon and it gave me an idea for a story of ‘something strange, spectacular and out of this world.’ This idea grew into a children’s book, Hinterland, which made it to the shortlist of a significant prize for unpublished novels. I remember the magic of writing that story, of describing grey dust and a terraced crater like an amphitheatre and ‘hanging like a jewel against the dense black void, with fat blue oceans and swirling white clouds’, our planet. And I think to myself, I need to rediscover what that story meant to me and maybe, just maybe, roll it out onto the launchpad once more and send it into the ether myself.

So thank you, Buzz.’

Three years on, after a week of TV programmes celebrating the moon landing mission, what are my thoughts on re-reading this post? The moon missions and the space programmes still speak to us of heroism, imagination, persistence, resilience, and all the power of human aspiration. We are in awe of the courage of the astronauts. We are in awe at the sight of the mighty and beautiful Saturn V thundering into the sky, fuel roaring and crackling as it burns its way into the heavens. This is wonderful. Fifty years on, it is still heart-stoppingly wonderful.

Yet we live on a riven planet, despairing as prejudice and the meaner aspects of human nature hold sway. Our planet is in more danger than ever before – and that is down to us. No stray asteroid or conquering alien race threatens us: we threaten ourselves.

Buzz and his like remind us that even in imperfection, in in-fighting and rivalry, in near-misses and tragic accidents, in times when it doesn’t seem worthwhile to believe in any ideal at all, that vision and a sense of human destiny still matter.

Keep going out there and looking up. Keep dreaming. Keep asking for the moon. And the stars. And everything we as humans are capable of. Keep trusting we can be the best we can be. (And by the way, that doesn’t mean going back to the moon simply to wrest the mineral riches out of it. I would rather we never went back than that we went back as raiders and exploiters. We have done enough of that on our own sublunary globe.)

As for Hinterland? Still waiting on the launchpad – but that doesn’t mean it won’t blast off sometime! In the meantime, the next book on my personal launchpad is The Unputdownable Writer’s Mindset. Because writers dream and take their own kind of risks; they need to believe those risks are worth taking. Even if they’re not flying to the moon.

Visit www.theunputdownablewriter.com to sign up for advance news and sneak peeks ahead of publication.