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Writing into the Abyss: Where Depression and Creativity Intersect

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I sit in front of my laptop, or my desktop, or on a throwback day, with pen in hand and spiral pad underneath.  I try to write.  Some days I am successful.  Many days I am not.

There are two books that I want to work on, am working on, will work on.  One should be easy.  It’s already mapped out in my head and outlined on paper.  The other is more challenging, but I know I want it to be good.

My life is not where I want it to be by a long shot.  I have not reached the level of success or notoriety that I had hoped to have by the age of 35.  I look back on what I have accomplished and I see four novels and a book of poetry.  I understand.  I possess the knowledge that I have done more than what many writers have done in entire careers.  I understand that five books is a good thing.

But having the knowledge is not the same as feeling successful.  I write and I publish and the people say it’s good and they immediately want another, not understanding that I have put years of my life into a work that they finished in a weekend, in a day, sometimes even just one long night.  I give everything and more is desired right away.

With every new book comes the dread of following it up with another good book.  I don’t know that I can.  I never think that I can.

I feel, sometimes, that it’s all for nothing.  I am a success, but I don’t feel successful.

They want more books, but they don’t know what I have to go through to get there.

It is dark where I am.  My eyes are wide open but I can’t see a thing.  I know I have to go to Tartarus alone and claim what belongs to me.

I take the first step and the panic already creeps over me, but I continue in spite of the sweat that has drenched me almost immediately.  I am afraid that I will swallow my tongue, that I will stop breathing, that I will die on the spot.  But I don’t, in spite of a racing heart and spinning head.

I descend further and further into the abyss for days, months, years, searching for my prize.  I know it is here.  It is always here.  My greatest creativity has always been housed in my greatest pain.  I cannot leave until I retrieve it.

I finally hit the basement level of my descent and all around me are the demons I have been avoiding.  I have to acknowledge them in order to pass.  They demand it.

My own doubts.  My own fears.  They screech beside me begging for attention.  I ignore them and go deeper.

The mentor who betrayed me time and again. The father who doesn’t love me.  Fathers and father figures alike grabbing at my shoulders to hold me back.  I break free.  I break through.

I see authoritarians there.  You supervised me into submission.  You bossed me into victimhood.  You signed my checks but you couldn’t sign my life.  I vanquish you, too.  I go deeper.

I see the men.  I see the ones who loved me wrong.  I see the ones I loved.  I see the ones who inspired poems:

i was born in diana’s tide with a caul over my third eye

And I see the ones who are the reason that I haven’t written more than two poems in the past decade.  I pretend as though I feel more comfortable with fiction but the truth is I feel too broken to write poetry.

And even the ones I still love are there, compassing me about.  I break free.

I see me.  I see body image.  I see someone who doesn’t feel worth it.  I see an utter lack of hope, a vision of a future that is not there, in which I have not been remembered.  I am dust.

And there, just beyond the nihilism, just one more step beyond the limits of my odyssey, it is there:

The next novel.

That is what it is like to write.  Every single novel.

I cannot write until things are right.  Every time I sit down to work on something, practically everything, even this blog post, I feel like I am going back to Hell to confront all of my demons all at once.  I feel short of breath and I give up to work on other things that make me happy and give me some meaning.

I know that being a writer is my destiny and my gift to the world, but I can’t always do it.  This, in spite of the many people who ask me when the next book will be out.  If I could make a living on my writing, I would write three a year.  But I cannot live in the abyss in order to do that.

This is not writer’s block.  This is depression.

I will beat it someday.

Where did Lazarus come from?

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1) Where did you get the idea for the series of Lazarus, Covenant, & Epiphany?

2) Did it all come to you in one big idea? Or a little bit at a time, and that’s how it became 3 books.  — Rico W.

 

The story of the Lazarus Trilogy began with a question:  What would happen if the star basketball player got into a relationship with the most popular young man on campus?

That idea became a play that I wrote in 2000 called Behind Closed Doors, and later named Discretion.  It was the story of a slightly different (yet familiar) Adrian Collins who was living with a basketball player named Isaiah, while dealing with mild Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from having been hazed and literally beaten off line from Beta Chi Phi.  (Although he was still initiated into the fraternity, he was viewed as an outcast for being gay.)

In the midst of this story, he falls in love with Isaiah and deals with his ex-boyfriend Carlos, who he lost while pledging.

When the play was finished, I tried to stage a reading, but only my friends Maya (RIP) and Amerie showed up to help out.  On top of that, my mentor at the time, Dennis Williams, said the play was good, but he wanted to know more about Carlos the ex-boyfriend and about the pledging process.

So I made the decision in 2000 to rework this story as a novel, beginning with the fraternity story and saving the love story for a subsequent novel if I still felt like it.  I also decided to postpone writing it until after I finished undergrad.  Incidentally, it was also during this time that my “black vampire” idea was born.

In fall 2001, I began writing the novel called Lazarus.  President’s Day Weekend 2002, it was complete.  I published it in 2005.

Of course, Carlos became Savion and Isaiah only made cameo appearances in Lazarus, so Covenant still had to be written.  It was completed in 2007 and published in 2011.  That novel was quick and easy to write because I already knew how it would turn out.

While writing Covenant, I had ideas for two more novels.  In the end, there were to be four novels, more or less mirroring the four years of college.  If you have read Epiphany, imagine the first two-thirds being novel #3, and the last third being novel #4, plus a story line about Adrian becoming the Dean of the line during his senior year.  But I decided that I was done writing about the fraternity experience.  While interesting to me, I don’t think most people would care about Sigma Chapter anymore after one novel about Adrian’s experience on Uprising and another about his experiences bringing in the Phantoms.

Oh hell, while we’re here, I might as well tell you about what was going to happen on the next line.  So Calen was going to get elected Dean of Pledges, then he was going to have a terrible car accident and have to take a semester off school to recover.  The chapter was going to recruit six guys:

Morris Jordan from Potomac was going to be the Ace.  As you know, he had a previous history with Adrian.  As the Dean, Adrian felt it might not be appropriate for Morris to make the line, given their past, but the chapter liked him so Adrian was outvoted.  After he gets a little….shall we say “sassy” with Adrian, he is given the line name “Cruel Intentions.”

Kyle Sykes, a business student from Rock Creek, was the deuce.  All I know about him is that his personal motto was “greed is good” which landed him the line name “Monopoly.”

Justin Wilson and Jason Wilson were twins attending Potomac.  My notes on them indicate that they were always nervous  so the chapter named them “Paralysis” and “Aphasia.”

The number five was Leon Rogers, a theology student from Rock Creek who is named “Holy Terror” because he turns out to be a homophobe that can’t seem to respect his Dean.

Finally, the number six is Shane O’Neil from Potomac.  Everyone seems to think he a guitar-playing, stoner white boy, but he is actually biracial and struggling to find himself through the fraternity.  Because he is so unique, and some would say strange, he is given the line name “Xenogenesis,” which is not only the prior name of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series, but it literally means “the supposed generation of offspring completely and permanently different from the parent.”

Needless to say, a lot was going on with this line, which Adrian named “Crucial Conflicts.”  But in the end, I decided to make Mohammed their Dean to allow Adrian the chance to focus on his national position that he gained at the end of Epiphany and to provide a way for Mohammed to gain the respect of the chapter.  And I didn’t think those things needed to happen “on-page” for them to be believable.

So that’s how Epiphany was written the way it was, with that “extra third” at the end which seemed like a separate story altogether.  At the end, three college novels was enough, and if I was going to continue to write about these beloved characters, they’d have to be young adults removed from the college campus.