Is Writer's Depression Different to Writer's Block?

I asked Tim Denning this while he gave me a reacharound in the bath.

What are the secret ingredients?

We’ve all been through that crap — looking back to when we were performing at our writing ‘peak’, and analysing what the fuck we were doing differently like some leather-shoed business analyst.

The first thing I always look at is my health and diet.

Am I exercising like Billy Blanks? Eating well? I mean it's written everywhere that doing weights and eating raw cabbage like a fucking hamster will surely set you on the road to literary euphoria.

It’s bullshit.

During those times when I was flowing like liquid chocolate from Nigella Lawson’s anus, I was half dead, not exercising, and eating McDonald’s too much. 

Fuck you, you fat bastard.

Was I smoking weed in those times of flow? 

I’ve written about that shit many times. I think weed is good for generating ideas but for writing itself it’s kakakaka pudding. You can write unbelievable stanzas on curing rare diseases when yo hi, but the next day it’s like reading the encrypted diaries of an ex-Nazi meth-head scientist with dementia.

And if you smoke it regularly, weed just smothers you in bubble wrap like an Amazon package and makes you stop giving a fuck about everything except smoking weed.

Yeah, I’m talking to you, you goddamn bong weasel.

What about drinking?

Look, I read about how Hemmingballs, Bukowski, Thompson and the others got blind drunk while writing. For me, there’s this terrible reflux to consider and the two broken laptops that I previously, in a drunken state, threw out of the window.

None of those fuckers had laptops. What did they have to throw out of windows? Their pens? Their typewriters? Their wives? Themselves?

Then there was that visit from the local police after I was caught hanging around in my neighbour, Mrs Flapsbury’s garden spying through her bathroom window.

The trouble with drinking is it kills your decision-making skills.

The real trouble is that drinking kills any hope of discipline which, one might say is quite important to a writer.

Discipline. It’s something.

My environment is the same, what about the season? 

There's no fucking pattern you goat fanciers. I've written good stuff at all times of the year everywhere.

On the Costa del Sac, in the hottest of summers.

In Cape Honk in the harshest of winters.

So what is it?

The more I think about what stops me from writing well, the worse it gets.

I think I am impotent, therefore I am impotent - Descartes

After a while, I realise it might have something to do with depression.

• It doesn't help when you have stories without a single damn view. 

• It doesn’t help when you publish books on Amazon and no fucker wants to buy them, therefore you empty all your gold into Bezos’s pockets so he can promote your books and then take another cut of them anyway. 

• It doesn't help when literary agents are too damn self-serving to write you a quick note that says, ‘We won't make any money from you so fuck off.’

• It doesn’t help when you see books with titles like The true secret to not giving a fuck and the prick is selling goddamn millions.

If ya wanna not give a fuck, I’ll show ya that. It’s fuckin easy. Ya don’t need to read a fucking book. Just smoke cheeba for a week and ya done.

And yer just don't see any damn hope in the world so yer turn off the media to make yourself happier but you end up sitting there clueless and realising that there's fuck all left for ya to write about except maybe that ant that just ran across your keyboard. Yeah that one. Surely that's interesting.

Hello Mr Ant. Do you like honey?

And what kind of sexual positions?

Do ants have money?

I’d like to meet your wife for dinner.

Look up her skirt

Have an affair with your sister.

Surely it’s better than drinking the gin.

Do your family all live in a bin?

I hate myself. 

I used to despise people who said things like, 

I just have to write.

I used to tell them, 

If I was rich, I wouldn't write. I wouldn't do anything.

Now I understand where they're coming from.

I have to write.

Do I enjoy it? 

No

Does a crackhead enjoy crack?

I don't think so. They just need to smoke it to feel normal after a while.

That's how I feel — not normal — unbalanced like a crackhead without crack.

I wish I’d never started this damn writing habit. 

It's supposed to come in waves this creativity, but this wave has been too long.

The door is closed and there's a sign on it that says,

Closed for winter.

I don’t know when winter will end. 

And I know I should simply wait, and it will come. This has happened before, say the ancient bastards sitting in their ancient circle on my purple crown chakra

But then that tiny ant looks up at me with those tiny familiar black eyes of his and whispers,

Fuck it, Frank. Remember how your ambition was to die alone and broke, with syphilis in a brothel like all the great writers of the past?

And he’s right that fucker. 

Sometimes ye just need that little reminder of why you’re here.

• Why the fuck are you getting depressed about your lack of success again?

• It’s not the goal, you fuckwit.

So I punch myself in the phallus and stop trying to be successful for the eighth time this week.

And I realise that maybe there's just something in that.

The writer’s depression is real. It freezes you like yesterday’s chicken, blocking your path to the creative rumba. Cos if yer a writer—I mean a real writer, not a slick turd writing in a profitable niche, there’s so much to get depressed about. But it all ends when you end this idea of getting sucked off by literary groupies at book signings in exotic places and writing on a gold typewriter in your marble mansion.

There is no success for us, my friends.

So stop trying to make it and write something that makes someone feel something would ya?

And remember the creed of the true writer, laid down in the words of this celestial ant:

Aim to die alone, and broke, with syphilis in a brothel like all the great writers of the past.

That should fix your fucking depression.

And I take another grey M&M from the bag of cosmic dread, take a long out-breath and press my fingers on the keys for the thirtieth time today. 

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