How Can I Pick Just One

Neuroses. Yes, plural. I have them. I know I have them. I try desperately to hide the fact that I'm plagued by the monsters. For the longest time, I tried to kid myself that I *wasn't* a neurotic writer. When that patently wasn't going to fly, I tried to convince myself that I could keep the insecurities under wraps. No one need know. Just me and the harpies in my head. Remember the scene in When Harry Met Sally where they cover high maintenance versus low maintenance? Yeah. Pretending I wasn't neurotic made me the worst thing I could be:  a nutjob who *thinks* she's not a complete whacko.

So what's my poison? The rumbling ground-shaker of mental worms: "Not Good Enough". That's the niggling, tiny voice that oh, so innocently insinuates that this story is nowhere near as good or fun or #insertadjectiveofchoicehere as the last story. It sneaks up behind you at the dinner table and whispers, "Wow, that sauce is missing something, isn't it?" When you're driving to the doctor's office, it's the invisible hand that shoves a memory front and center - typically the memory of that awful, terrible thing you did to your best friend in whatever grade - the point is, you hurt someone and the point of this neurosis is to make you feel like the single lowest form of life on earth. It's the fear that you're nothing more than a mediocre hack and that's all you'll ever be, by God. It's the voice that pipes up just as you're dropping off to sleep that says, "God, that scene your wrote today is stupid. Can't you come up with something that's actually interesting?"

This neurosis is brutal and vicious. Under the pressure of this neurosis, I stopped taking care of the house. Then I stopped writing. Left unchecked, this neurosis can become deadly. There's a fine line between the persistant 'You're Simply Not Good Enough' messaging and 'If You're Not Ever Going to Be Good Enough to Do the Thing You Love, Why Are You Even Here?' That's suicide chatting you and me up, right there. It came to call on me on Tuesday - a lovely sunny day - as I was driving back from . . . whatever it was I'd been doing. I've seen the sights in 'death ain't so bad' land. Not impressed by them. I know the tricks. I don't fall for them anymore. Action was required to counter this neurosis. Immediate, decisive action.

I came home and made a cup of tea. Then I sat down with a pen and paper and free wrote - this is an emptying out exercise designed merely to lance the boil and drain the gunk mucking up my head. Then I wrote about what I want from myself and from my life. This gives me a clear picture to use as ammo against this particular neurosis. One of the most powerful things you can do when dealing with neuroses is to stop the repetition (I call it a tape) when you realize you're being tormented by your own brain. Stop the tape and then consciously build an image of the best case scenario. (The rule says: Give the best case scenario equal time.) An example: with the 'not good enough' tape, I mentally yell 'cut' and then visualize my book altar (what? You don't have one?) lined with tens of individual titles - all by Marcella Burnard. Free writing helps, too. As some of the crap drains to paper, I gain space and perspective. Patterns of thought emerge - things that can be broken down, addressed and fixed. I called my naturopath. Supplements, exercise and light therapy were prescribed - in Seattle, all neuroses are aided and abetted by the pathologically short, gray days.

All well and good. But believe me when I say that nothing is going to be allowed to get between me and my work. If I have to resort to a course of pharmaceutical psychoactive meds to kick this neurosis in the teeth, I will. Cause, you think a neurotic who doesn't think she's neurotic is bad? Wait until you piss off that neurotic by telling her she can't work anymore and that all those stories wandering around in her head are never going to be told.

Pick, Pick, Pick

Yeah, this is me.

I actually had a different picture in mind - I was thinking more of that old Perdue commercial about people picking from a chicken over the course of a few days. (I am dating myself terribly - that was from 1985, y'all.) But you know what? Pictures of a plate of nasty chicken bones are really sorta gross.

So.

No. I give you the weirded out cat.

Anyway, my neurosis is often a sort of compulsive urge to revisit the scene of the crime. Case in point - let's take reviews. My book came out a few weeks ago, and of course I've heard all sorts of advice - don't read the reviews...do read the reviews...etc. etc.

So, yes. I read the reviews. The good. The bad. The ugly.

I don't respond to them publicly, of course. I might whine a little to my fellow word whores behind the scenes, but I still continue to look at them. In fact, I tend to reread them multiple times (especially the bad ones.)  It sounds like it would be a bit destructive, and maybe it is - but I've actually found that the more I read them, the less it stings. Eventually they stop hurting and I can look at them more objectively.

Of course I do the same thing with revision letters and CP notes. I don't know if it's one of those things where words have power or what, but it seems to be one of the only ways I can really process them. Maybe it's just a defense mechanism.

I tend to do it with other things in my life as well, particularly things that are hurtful. Sometimes it's blissfully numbing. Sometimes I do it in small pieces until I can absorb it as a whole for what it is.

Sometimes it backfires terribly and I obsess about it until even *I* realize it's not doing me any good. (And yeah, maybe there's a masochistic streak in me somewhere that likes the self-infliction of pain. Who knows?)

At any rate, I'm not sure if the review thing is good or bad, but I suspect I'm going to need to stop reading them soon, because I can totally see where giving them too much power doesn't exactly help the creative process of writing. In fact, I imagine it can give you a case of verbal paralysis - are you writing the story you want to write? Or are you writing a story you think will give you good reviews? The doubts come slinking in and they can be quite terrible.

But hey - look what I found!

Nutbuckets and Neuroses

by KAK

“Favorite” and “Neurosis” are not terms a sane person would mush together. I don’t recall which of my fellow Word Whores came up with this gem of a topic, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only nutter on the blog.

 I might be the only nutbucket.

Allow me to regale you with how I have to reorder the sugar packets at the table so the labels all face the same direction. Splenda sorted from Sweet & Low, Sugar in the Raw placed before regular granulated sugar. Little blue notches pointed up. Gods help my dining partner if we’re at breakfast joint that has jelly cups. Oh yes, there will be flavor sorting and alphabetization. 

It’s not a need for order that drives me to do it.

It’s a need for control. More precisely, it’s my civilized reaction to an uncontrollable need to escape. Public dining is pure hell for me. I can’t get up and leave when my brain decides it has had enough of being trapped, confined. Organizing the stuff on the table is my only available means of distraction. You’d think that stimulating conversation would rein in my neurosis. Tragically, it all becomes din behind the ringing in my ears.

CLANG. CLANG. CLANG. TIME TO GO.

Don’t take it personally. It’s not you. It’s me. No. Really. It is me. I can’t always help it when the mind goes. Sometimes, it likes to drag the body along with it. That’s when Public gets oogey. But when mind leaves body alone, well, now that’s when the anxiety and the obsession become creative paydirt.

It’s why I’m a 5,000-Feet Plotter.

The loose outline employing the GMC (Goals, Motivations, Conflicts) keeps chapters, or episodes, linked. The protagonist’s goal shapes the walls of the restaurant. Conflict is delivered on china at unexpected times, and there’s always the offer for more…at a price. Dialogue flows to the beat of conflict. The neurosis I loathe in real life becomes the motivation that propels the action. It builds from mild discomfort to violent desperation that explodes in resolution.

It’s great in fiction.

Total nutbucket in real life.

What about you? Do you have a behavior that works against you in public, but works for you in your creative endeavors?

Catastrophizing

-

by Laura Bickle

I was ruminating about what to write about last night. I told my husband: "I'm supposed to blog about my favorite neurosis."

"You have to pick just one?" he said.

Sigh. Yes, my neuroses are many and varied. But I will choose just one to focus on...catastrophizing.

Catastrophizing is something of a classic neurosis. It goes beyong pessimism. It's not only expecting the absolute worst, it's anticipating the end of the world. In my imagination, a light left on can become a house fire that devours everything. The cat's hairballs are a symptom of serious digestive ills. Failure to check the transmission fluid levels on the car monthly can result in a breakdown. And on and on. What if..? What if..?

My imagination can turn a paper cut into MRSA and certain death. Sure, it's exhausting. There's a whole lot of stuff to keep track of in life. Mostly, I keep my shit together and life cruises along as it should. My brain will shift gears into worst case scenario mode once in awhile. Then, it's time to take a nap, do some yoga, and get over myself.

But I have managed to find the silver lining in an overactive imagination.

It helps me write.

What's the worst thing that can happen to my protagonist? My fingers fly across the keyboard as I imagine the worst of the worst. Dragons. Fire. Radiation sickness. Broken relationships. Ruined career. I keep flinging it at her, like a monkey with a cageful of poo. I can conjure destruction from serene nothing, and I'm sure gonna exploit that ability in a way that serves me.

Feel bad for my protagonist. I sure do.

But any weakness has a flip side strength. My neuroses, to be fair, occasionally distract me from everyday life. But I wouldn't trade them in for anything. They help me create a world with a chain reaction of bad events, to trip up my heroine and send her face-down in the mud. She always gets back up.

And I know that I would, too, if the sky ever fell in on me.

Neurosis or No

by Jeffe Kennedy


War having thus been declared against the bear, all the four-fooled beasts were summoned: the ox, the ass, the cow, the goat, the stag, and every animal on the face of the earth. The wren, on the other hand, summoned every flying thing; not only the birds, great and small, but also the gnat, the hornet, the bee, and the flies.

~ The Wren and the Bear, Grimm's Fairy Tales

Not long ago, we were joking about how my mom used to worry about me eating one thing at a time during dinner. I was a kid then and she would try to get me to take a bite of each thing on the plate. I preferred to eat all of my meat, then all of my veggie, etc. Then another girl wrote into Ann Landers with the same problem. Her mother said it was rude, but would abide by Ann's take. Ann saw nothing wrong with it, so my mom quit bugging me, too. We laughed about the old story and then I asked why it had bothered her so much.

"I read about autistic kids not wanting their food to touch," she said, "and I didn't want you to be, well, weird."

I can see her point. I tend to be a passionate person about the things I'm interested in. An idea can consume me and I'll lose hours to it. This kind of concentration makes me a good student, a good writer and, also, is just a short step away from obsessive-compulsive behavior.

I try to keep a balance. And I don't regard myself as a neurotic person.

According to Wikipedia (motto: It Could Be True)

Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations, whereby behavior is not outside socially acceptable norms. It is also known as psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus those suffering from it are said to be neurotic. The term essentially describes an "invisible injury" and the resulting condition, and is no longer officially used by the scientific, medical, and psychiatric community.

When I told Marcella that this is an archaic term, that I wasn't sure why we would think about neuroses and that I wasn't sure what people even meant by it, she said:

Used by artists to describe how we drive ourselves fucking insane with shit that hasn't happened yet. You can quote me.

So I did.

I found the woodcut above in a bookstore in Inverness. They'd taken illustrations from books that had fallen apart and sold them separately. It doesn't scan well, since it's sepia-toned, somewhat blurry to begin with and under glass. Alas. I have it hanging next to my writing desk because it says something to me.

In the story, the bear insults the wren's children, because the wolf call the wren the King of all birds, and the bear doesn't see much palatial about the nest. They end up dragging all the animals into war. This image, of them all boiling up out of darkness, ready to battle - it has something to do with where I write from.

The women in my family have a tendency to go crazy. Dementia is the tender word for it these days. I wrote about this in Appliances, one of the essays in Wyoming Trucks, True Love and the Weather Channel. It tells the story about my grandmother's dementia and how it manifested in daily worrying about the sounds the refrigerator made. I say:

We are a family of passionate women. Women who like men, especially the dashing variety. Women who like to drink, who like to make big dinners, who spend their money on art and travel. We are also the women who check the mailbox twenty times in one day, waiting for something to arrive.

I suppose I'm saying I don't have a favorite neurosis. All my energy goes in the other direction. I try not to let my passion become obsession. I keep the peace in my own mind so the dark creatures don't boil over into battle. I work hard not make myself insane over things I can't control.

I try to keep the balance.