: Re: Can I be a writer, with a mental illness? I want to be a writer, but I have struggled with Schizoaffective Disorder for quite some time. Some of the symptoms of the disorder are amotivation

@Angela458

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I would submit that a mental illness may be an advantage in being a writer.

Writing, to me, is about observation. Experiencing things, observing them, and capturing that experience on paper is the essence of really great writing. It might become fictionalized by a thin veneer such as a different name for a real person, or it might be fantasized to the point where a talking dragon is having a conversation with an animated shoe, but if the underlying feeling is based on something the writer has actually experienced, it will be more vivid and have more impact. Impact is everything, so the writer who has real life experiences outside the vanilla norm is at an advantage when it comes to writing things that transport someone far away from their normal life but making it so realistic that they can't put it down.

Many of the very best writers had an unconventional background. Many of the very best also had issues of one kind or another. From drugs to depression, intense personal experiences and challenges have led to some of the best writing ever published. The key is to get across the feeling that goes along with that struggle, so someone who has never faced it can identify with and understand the protagonist and go along for a ride somewhere they would never, ever be able to see and experience in their own life.

The key, to me, is first observation as I said. Working on distilling down what you experienced in real life into the most concise form possible while maintaining feeling. Then, the creative part is to attach these kinds of real things to fictional stories, fictional locations, fictional people. If you are a combat vet, you still don't know what it is like to be part of a group of knights charging at a horde of monsters, but you do know what it feels like to go into combat, so you can make that fantasy battle have the kind of gut-punch realism that will make readers feel like your whole fantasy world is somehow real.

You may not know what it is like to have a physical handicap but you can probably extrapolate from what it is like to overcome a challenge that you carry with you all the time. You may not know what it is like to grow up in an abusive household, but you can probably extrapolate something about the inherent difficulties of fitting in. These are the kinds of stories that really bring out the waterworks in readers. To me, that is great, because the very first thing I want to do above anything else is make my reader feel something.

As for the actual writing part: just decide what you are going to accomplish and be ruthless with yourself until you do it. It is very simple. Writing itself is a very simple, mechanical activity that gets better with practice. Having a great story to tell is a lot harder. If I were you, I'd think about storytelling before writing. You say you have a lot of half finished stories lying around. That's great. It tells me you have the mechanical activity down. If I were you, I would find a friend, someone who you feel pretty comfortable with and who is a good listener. Sit down with them somewhere comfortable and just tell them a story. It can be totally made up, it can be totally true. Just tell a story. Practice telling stories to various people as much as you can, and you will develop a sense of timing, a feel for what gets a reaction, and an instinct for a story that will be so compelling that it will force you to complete it once you start to put it on paper. You need to find a story that is important to you, or it will never be important to your reader.

From Pat Conroy's Prince Of Tides:

“You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.”

Edit: had to add a quote from Hemingway:

“You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless—there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing,”

Ernest Hemingway in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald 1929

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