In 2001, right after I had published my first novel, I found out I had bipolar disorder. The manic episode leading me to visit my doctor was severe. It was not just a state of elevated energy; I hallucinated and barely knew where I was.
Before then I had not known I had bipolar disorder, despite a similar episode in high school; yet, I had struggled with it for most of my adult life.
My doctor prescribed medication, and the treatment worked – but I missed my manic state as my mood swung toward its other, grimmer “pole.” I only wanted to sleep. When I woke, the idea of getting through a new day filled me with terrible dread.
I had to force myself to feed the cat, to wear any clothes other than pajamas. I imagined the future stretched out dismally, hopelessly, before me, offering an endless succession of long, dull days. That was not the worst part.
What deepened my depression more than anything was I could not write – not anything I liked. There was no joy in the process anymore either. It was as if an important part of who I was had simply died – and right after I had published my first novel.
I had started writing the book a few years before my episode. I had self-published it and shared it with family, friends and a college professor, who had all liked it. I later did a book signing at a local store, and my novel even rated a four star review on Amazon written by someone in Australia I had never met.
Though it was not a financial success, I was proud of it. I had enjoyed writing my novel and wanted to write another. I had started a new one, right before my episode, and had written in my journal about how freely my ideas were flowing.
Yet when I tried to pick up where I had left off, everything had changed. Stringing the simplest sentences together had become an unbearable chore; the ones I wrote sounded stiff. The writing reflected how I felt; it mirrored my numbness.
I had also stopped “writing in my head.” In the past, sentence rhythms and fragments had often drifted through my head, impressions that I planned to include the next time I sat down to write.
This had been a part of me for so long, the sudden silence was alarming. My flights of imagination had crashed, leaving me to struggle beneath the wreckage.
Depression was not new to me. It had sailed in on the first winds of my adolescence and made itself at home. Even during moments of happiness, it was always near, slyly peaking around corners, waiting. Still, even during its prolonged visits, I could usually write.
Back then, too, my moods had always had a way of rebounding.
My new depression did not allow this. Not only could I not write; I did not feel like myself at all. I couldn\’t look at my novel or anything I had written without a profound feeling of loss. The words seemed unconnected to me, as if someone else had written them. I was jealous of Other Me – the one I had left behind.
I blamed the medicine. I thought it had constructed a low, impenetrable ceiling for my moods, rendering creative thought impossible. I had endured writer\’s block before, and it had never been fun – but this was the first time I believed it had been chemically induced.
Desperate, I went on the internet to see what other creative people had to say about my bipolar medication. The stories were disappointingly similar – laments of painters who could no longer paint, writers who could no longer write. Vital, creative people had become zombies. I could find no stories of anyone who had continued to take the drug and recovered their creativity.
I tried to quit taking the medicine, willing to risk another manic episode to write again. Yet without the medicine, I could not sleep. Even worse, I itched.
This was not normal itching; it was all over, and intense. By the time I had scratched one itch, a new one had already appeared. By the end of the week I was exhausted. I had large red welts on my arms and legs from scratching.
Each attempt to quit the medicine ended in defeat. I berated myself for sacrificing my artistic soul for something so pointless as sleeping.
Meanwhile, I read articles and saw documentaries on bipolar disorder that portrayed sufferers as creative geniuses, making the point that treating the illness with drugs sadly limited the creative gifts of the manic state. The documentaries always left me pining for my milder (or less hallucinatory) manias and planning new attempts to quit my medicine.
More than anything, I wanted to go back – back to the time, before my episode, when the ideas has flowed freely. But how? I needed guidance, or maybe a trail – maybe a trail of crumbs like the one in Hansel had left in a classic fairy tale. A road, a path, a map. Anything would have been welcome.
My well-meaning family pressured me to write another novel. My dad thrust a few of my old essays at me that had won awards in the local writers\’ guild, declaring, “You are wasting yourself.”
My husband tried to encourage me. “You can still write,” he said. “Writing a novel is just hard. Like running a marathon. If it wasn\’t hard, everyone would do it.”
I had to agree – but I made the point that not everyone had to write on a mood stabilizing drug, which was the marathon equivalent of wearing weights on my ankles. “The ones without the weights are more likely to win,” I argued.
I saw it then – the glimmer of triumph in his eyes. I braced myself, knowing I had set a trap for myself and what the next words would be. Before I could clamp my palms over my ears, he said, “People who run marathons with weights on their ankles become stronger.”
I groaned inside. So predictable. No sympathy. Just a thin, inspirational analogy about building inner strength. Why could no one understand that what they were asking was impossible – that they might as well have been asking me to build a rainbow bridge to Mars and sell hot-dogs on its airless, unpopulated surface?
Still, I wanted to make them happy – so I tried to remember exactly what I had done before, and how it had felt. I thought that it had been easy then – that I had approached the task with confidence and energy, which were both locked away from me now.
But an idea was forming, weakly at first, nebulous, in the midst of desperation: maybe I could make a choice. Maybe I could just write without any special feeling. Maybe I could defy the universe and the muses and the whims of fate – and just write anyway.
II.
Write anyway.
Though it did not happen dramatically or painlessly, this was when the change began – with the idea that writing was a choice.
I did finally write another novel and rediscovered my joy and excitement in writing. But there were many steps in between, and I wish I had taken them sooner.
When I was blocked, I had often thought that if I could ever find my way back to a place where I could write another novel and enjoy it, I would record my steps and share them with everyone.
My title is from the story of “Hansel and Gretel.” When the children are forced away from home, Hansel drops a trail of bread crumbs through the woods to enable them to find their way back.
When I wrote my second novel, this is what I wanted to do in reverse: to make notes, so that if I ever lost my way again, I would have the “trail” I had wanted earlier – a record of my steps.
However, this book departs from the analogy in an important way. In the fairy tale, birds eat the crumbs, removing the trail. But since I am recording everything and not depending only on memory, the birds are no threat here.
Throughout this book, I will be specific about the steps I took, from the belief that I would never enjoy writing again to finishing a second novel, and what I learned along the way.
This book covers a few tips on the craft of fiction, but it is more about the mental game of writing, specifically focusing on the novel. It addresses some of my misconceptions about writing that others share.
Getting over them has freed me to experiment, take risks, and learn more about writing.
In my research to find stories about bipolar disorder sufferers who had found creativity again on mood stabilizing drugs, I had found a void; I want to fill it with this book.
I know that books on overcoming writer\’s block are not especially rare. However, I had avoided them because I had been certain that mine was a special case – caused by a mood stabilizing drug.
Yet writer\’s block is writer\’s block, and the way out of it is much the same whether you have bipolar disorder or not.
No matter how it seems or what your situation is, a path to creative freedom exists. Your path may not be mine exactly, but there may be similar landmarks.
Part narrative, part instruction, the following chapters are my trail – and I will now share it with you, crumb by crumb.