Addiction and Writing
How being hooked on my craft has its good points
Writing is a profession to me these days, but I can remember very clearly when it wasn’t. When it was something I chased, hustled for, even asked strangers how they could help me get it in my life more.
When it was my addiction-in-waiting.
To paraphrase a sentence often used to describe poker, writing can be a tough way to make an easy living.
On the one hand, writing is free-flowing, my true purpose in life and what inspires me as much as it is a tool for my expression. But it can also be tough. Days go by where I’m writing circa 6,000 words, none of which are for my novel. What puts food on my children’s table is writing and I am thankful every day for that... but I can also get frustrated. I think that’s because I’m addicted to the allure of writing as a free course of action.
Withdrawal symptoms, waking up at night thinking about it, getting up in the morning and needing a fix, craving the next hit throughout the day – I could be talking about a drug habit.
But writing is my addiction.
When I was eleven, I wrote my own ‘magazine’. It was two sheets of A4 white paper stapled together in order to make eight pages of A5. The front cover was my favourite bit. I’d write what readers (my siblings) could learn about in the middle pages of the ‘magazine’. I’d tease stories, trail competitions (OK, wordsearches) and hype BREAKING NEWS. Oh, and I’d Sellotape a wrapped sweet if I could find one to the front cover, promised as a ‘FREE GIFT!!!’ to the first person to claim it.
This magazine provided my brothers and sister with the opportunity to read my awful pre-pubescent writing while I learned my craft, but it provided so much more to me. A self-enforced deadline, a slew of content, new stories every week, it gave me discipline and demand.
And I liked that the demand came from myself.
That is where all addiction stems from, the monkey-brain part of us that feels not obsession - that burns out - but a compulsion to do something. I was and still am completely compelled to write, day and night. It stems from certain triggers in my childhood like the VHS Odyssey that overcame my early yearnings for stories.
I write for my living now, but more importantly I write and it gives my life purpose. Being legacy-minded rather than a live-in-the-moment type, this is a more permanent thing I leave behind than anything else.
Writing these days is very different. I’m four times as old as I was when I first started writing those childish magazines. For one thing, I became a real-life magazine editor in my thirties, which was a lot more complicated than sellotaping a WHAM bar to a piece of A4 paper.
Editing a magazine, scanning and rescanning for typos, proofing tens of thousands of words in a matter of hours, getting ready to press the ‘big red button’ that will print and distribute thousands of copies of a physical glossy magazine to paying readers around the country is a daunting thing. Every month it was published, I noticed that I was practically clawing at my own hair with the focused obsession with making it perfect. My addiction was almost unhealthy at that point.
Since leaving the magazine industry and going freelance, articles have become my addiction. They’re naturally addictive in the way that I get paid for them and food and heat costs money, but my compulsion also neatly fits into completing each article to the best of my ability and then moving onto the next one.
The next hit.
When it comes to my creative writing, completing each project has become tougher over the years, but only because those projects have become lengthier.
I began writing creatively in short stories. I loved the idea that a concept could be expanded on a little, brought into a mystery in the middle then wrapped up in a neat ending. There’s something so satisfying in that initial concept being explored, expanded, then neatly pulled together that is the writing equivalent of feeling the initial buzz of an addiction being fed, they enjoyed, then ended.
After each writing project, my compulsion would drive me to the next big idea, the next concept. Writing a novel was my mind’s way of focusing all those energies into a project that would both satisfy my incredible need to write and continue writing but also provide me with the biggest hit imaginable – completing one.
The day I finished my first novel it was something of a revelation to me. I honestly think nothing brought me closer to knowing what my purpose on the Earth was. I know that sounds grandiose. I understand that the birth of my two children do rank higher emotionally. But I’m talking about what the person – me – leaves behind in the world that is almost entirely of their own command.
Writing is that to me – the exploration of what is at the heart of this human being, constructed into your entertainment as a reader. What could be better at chasing, enjoying, bingeing on?
Writing as a compulsion doesn’t come without its complications. Addiction is rarely anything other than demanding of time, energy or emotion. Writing hoovers up all three. It drains the person of so much, then as we recover from delivering each piece of writing, we breathe in and recover, refilling again like a syringe sucking in liquid.
I never thought I had an addictive personality until I considered how I write. How I can work 14 days in a row – as I’ve been reminded this summer – without realising that I’ve been carrying my laptop (it’s nickname here is ‘Fruity Face’) with me wherever I go.
I’ve always been able to walk past table games in casinos without pausing to even consider playing them. I was never enticed by smoking, which to me looked like a fine way to burn money and smell rotten. I rarely drink and if I do, it’s only for pleasure and never to excess.
But throw me a paragraph, hand me an idea, slip me a perfectly constructed sentence? I’ll be hooked all over again.
We need to see one of these magazine covers if any still exist :)
Haha! If I had one I would certainly have included it 😂