Writing and Bipolar

Tuesday was a good day. Great, in fact. My rehabbed knee got good marks at my post-surgical and physical therapy appointments. I was fitted for a skiing brace. I made major progress on my novel--the groundbreaking kind of progress where seventy-two pages of chaos finally found its purpose. I had a writing class, and then a job interview. I got called back for a second interview. Yay!

I haven't had too many awesome days like this in the past two and a half years, so allow me to gloat a teeny bit. The downside of my good day is that I have positive news on the job front and the writing front. I write between phases of my job search to keep me productive and having a sense of accomplishment. When my writing starts to flag, I usually approach my job search with renewed vigor.

Here is the deal: I love to write. I also hate to writing. Let me tell a story.

Years ago, I read part of Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. (I read all of her book, An Unquiet Mind, about her battle with what is now called bipolar disorder.) Her thesis in Touched with Fire is that the emotional ups and downs of creative people is really bipolar. From the amazon.com review:

The anguished and volatile intensity associated with the artistic temperament was once thought to be a symptom of genius or eccentricity peculiar to artists, writers, and musicians. Her work, based on her study as a clinical psychologist and researcher in mood disorders, reveals that many artists subject to exalted highs and despairing lows were in fact engaged in a struggle with clinically identifiable manic-depressive illness.

While I have the utmost respect for Jamison, I think there might be another explanation. When I write, I have great days and miserable days. There are days when I get feedback that my topic is fascinating and my writing is clear and interesting. There are days when I think whatever it is I am writing is crap/unpublishable/boring and I should give up and get a real job where I could get dressed up every day, be around other people and get paid. Then I imagine the $2M book/movie deal with Matt Damon in the leading male role. Maybe I could make it big, I imagine. And then I started reading Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff and I think I suck. It isn't fair for me to compare my unfinished first draft to a final product that has been reviewed by professional editors, but I do.

I've been going to writing conferences and taken writing classes for almost ten years. If nothing else, writing is a wonderful hobby, but I wonder if I can make it a job, given what I like to write about. I know that in order for something to be published it needs

1. an interesting topic (this is the pitch),
2. to be well executed (this is the manuscript), and 
3. a potential audience (this is the marketing plan).

I think my novel has an interesting topic and a potential audience, which is great, but not sufficient. The book needs to be well written, and in all of my years of writing, I've never written fiction. It is fun to try, but another thing to succeed.

Unlike math jobs I've had in the past, writing has more ups and downs. Quant jobs have incremental progress, where projects progress one step at a time. Writing happens in fits and starts. Of course, a writer needs good habits. The hardest part of writing is getting your butt in the chair. I have decent (not awesome, but decent) writerly habits. Even with good habits, I find writing fiction full of highs and lows. Some days, I think this novel is the most viable project I've worked on, that this will be the one that gets published and finds an audience. Other days, I talk to writers and am reminded of the slog of finding an agent, editor, and publisher. After that, I'll find an article about agents who need new material and are searching for new talent.

I've never had this much of an emotional roller coaster in any other job, even running for office, as I do with writing, but I don't think I've developed bipolar disorder in the last two months. I think writing and other creative endeavors bring out the highs and the lows. I see my writing in the changing light of morning, noon and dusk. Sometimes the light shows me the value of what I have done, other times the flaws. Perhaps the act of creating and nature of creative work causes these deep mental fluctuations, not the other way around.