Creativity

I had a burst of creativity for half an hour or so last night, where I suddenly had to stop what I was doing and write up some of my depression story, but fictionalised, as a novel, both to try to get around the problem of writing about real people and perhaps to reach a wider audience than turning my blog into a misery memoir would have (although I think it might be a different audience rather than a wider one).  It was quite liberating to be able to write what feels true emotionally or what reads well rather than what actually happened.  This enabled me to write about a more extreme version of events.  It was also interesting to think that I could write about things that I would never have the courage to write about here, although in the event I got tired before reaching those bits.  After a bit over half an hour, I got exhausted and had to stop (it was quite late), but I carried on being creative for a bit longer as I had an idea for a second novel, this one not directly autobiographical, but still connected with the idea of being isolated in the frum (Orthodox Jewish) community.  I wrote a few hurried notes to save the idea.

It does happen periodically that I have a burst of inspiration for a project or novel.  I have an idea and become excited by it and think that this is the time I will make it work, but it burns out very quickly.  I fall back into depression and despair and think I don’t have the skill to make it work or I feel I should be focusing on job hunting or other tasks and neglect it.  I’m not quite sure how to stop that this time.  I suppose I could stop blogging for a while and try to focus on writing fiction, but they come from different parts of my head and I would probably also have the need to blog about my life, to process what has happened to me and my feelings.  I woke up today with no inspiration to write and thought the cycle of despair had started again, but as I got going and went to my interview, I wished I was writing again and I spent some time writing this afternoon despite having a headache.

I shall have to wait and see if I can keep up the motivation to write long-term, as well as seeing if I have the motivation and ability to plot and create characters, things necessary for a novel that are not needed for a blog.  Already I can see that blogs are static, while novels are dynamic; blogs tell you what already happened, while novels show you things happening in real time.  That’s a big leap to make.

I remember a discussion on Hevria.com when the site editors wanted to stop people submitting anonymous articles that said that if you have something that can’t be submitted under your name, fictionalise it.  I felt that I couldn’t write fiction; if nothing else, I feel my autistic empathy issues stop me understanding other people well enough to write about them, so it may be a leap to try and do it now.  However, I don’t have much to lose, especially if I continue redrafting my non-fiction Doctor Who book at the same time (unfortunately I’ve now lost the people who were going to look over a couple of chapters to give me feedback).

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I woke up today feeling exhausted and depressed (the heat probably meant I didn’t have great sleep).  I wasn’t even particularly anxious about my job interview, I was just feeling depressed and wishing I could get out of it somehow.  I mentioned when I was called to interview that I am in the process of being assessed for autism and they let me see the interview questions a bit in advance.  I’m not sure whether this really helped, as I was left sitting with them for half an hour or so as the interview panel members’ previous meetings overran and I was worried about over-rehearsing.  I think in the end that I was still incoherent at times, particularly when new ideas occurred to me during the interview.  I struggled to find the right words quite a bit.  I’m a lot more eloquent in writing than in speech.  I also felt that my answers were too short and lacking in detail.  I think when I’m in an interview, part of my unconscious mind realises that I can get out of the anxiety-inducing situation faster if I just give short answers, which is not good.

I have a migraine now.  I tried to do some more fiction writing because I was motivated and excited about it (when my rational mind is telling me to work on my non-fiction book or an article I’m hoping to sell to a Jewish newspaper), but my head hurts too much and I’ve come to a halt.  I feel a bit better than I did, but not really up to writing much (most of this post was written earlier).