How to Survive When Not Writing, by Josh Stallings

Q: Writers say they write because they have to. Is that true of you? What happens if you don’t write? Do you get cranky? Bereft? Restless?

My office is dark tonight

A: If you have any other choice, don’t love too deeply, don’t get married, don’t have children, and whatever you do don’t become a writer. Every one of these actions will sooner or later break your heart. 

If you are the sort of person who sees that the upside of these choices outweighs the risks. If you are willing to gamble it all on a person or persons. Then you’ll understand why I fall deeply in love with people and ideas.

I write for multiple reasons. It gives me exhilarating joy when a string of words come together and chime like a table full of crystal flutes.   

I write because I see a certain book in my head that I want to see in the world. 

I write because it gives me a reason to hang with other writers and I love their mad generous brains. 

Most of all I write because fiction is how I organize my feelings about my life past present and future. This isn’t to say I view writing as therapy but it can be therapeutic. 

Looking back at writing TRICKY I knew I was dealing with a dangerous interaction our family had with the LAPD. What I didn’t see was that it was a way for me to spend time with Dylan as he was before schizoaffective disorder. Cisco is a version of Dylan that I was desperately missing. Writing it made me confront grief and loss. 

Life being a funny bugger, by the time TRICKY was published the Dylan that we knew was back to his wonderful wise and wise-ass nature. 

Now as for what happens if I stop writing, I have had some recent experience with that. For both personal and business reasons I needed to walk away from writing. Stopping a third of the way into a novel felt like this, for the first three weeks I kept having ideas I hadn’t time to write, so I made lots of notes. After that I felt the story drifting away from my subconscious. I was very busy on a personal level so this didn’t cause much distress, until it did. 

I have nostalgia for my finished books once they are published. I miss how I felt when I was writing YOUNG AMERICANS. I miss hanging out in 1976 San Fransisco for the year I took to write it. Nostalgia erases the hard nights when I wanted to burn the first draft and walk away, leaving rosy images of youthful escapades and violent shenanigans. 

Walking away from an unfinished work in progress leaves me with what the Welsh call Hiraeth, a longing for a home or a feeling that no longer exists or never existed. This is more than a poetic metaphor, it is also logical. What is a work of fiction if not a home that never existed? Unfinished, it becomes an unkept promise.  

A purely psychological negative effect of not writing is that my emotions become more volatile. Writing allows me a productive place to let go of bottled up feelings. Real life can be hard, no shit, right? Some people given a rough day take it out on family or pets. Some crush it down with whiskey or drugs. Some become emotional zombies. I say this as a way to justify my solution, killing people.

I remember the first time I killed a whiny client. His name was Blake something or other and I blew him up with a car bomb. It felt good and just. Before you panic and call the cops, this murder was fictional. No cheese eating studio suits were harmed in the telling of this tale. 

Without fiction or whiskey I have turned to meditating to help even my moods out. It works when it works.

Here’s where I am today. Nine months after halting my latest book it is starting to bubble up again. I used to be arrogant, ok more arrogant. I would say, “no writing can be solved when you are away from your keyboard or pen and paper or chisel and rock tablet.” 

Now I cry bullshit on myself. 

In 1991 I was working at Mosfilm Movie Studio in Russia. Our Art Director Victor, told me a wonderful story about the invention of modern film editing. In the 1920’s the French lab that supplied Mosfilm with photographic chemicals for reasons lost to history, cut them off. For six months a group of film makers met every day and didn’t make films. Instead they smoked, drank Turkish coffee, and argued about film theory. Out of this time Sergei Eisenstein came up with the idea of montage. He describes this as, “Spatial forms and time could be broken within a montage, freeing the artist from artificial constructs and continuity editing to construct poetic film language.”

After chemicals started flowing back into Russia, Eisenstein made Battleship Potemkin and taught the world about the power of montage editing. Whether this is fact or fable doesn’t matter to me. What stuck with me was that sometimes my best work is done when I’m not “working.”   

Q: What happens if you don’t write? Do you get cranky? Bereft? Restless?

A: Yes. And as long as I don’t take those feelings out on those around me they can be useful. Even when I’m not writing, I’m writing.

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I can’t sign off without congratulating two of my fellow Criminal Minds on their Anthony Awards nominations. 

Catriona McPherson’s Scot in a Trap was nominated for BEST HUMOROUS NOVEL, and her Place of Fear was nominated for BEST HISTORICAL NOVEL.

Gabriel Valjan’s Hush Hush was nominated for BEST PAPERBACK/EBOOK/AUDIOBOOK, and his “C.O.D.” was nominated for BEST SHORT STORY.

Two nominations each, wow. Clearly neither of these brilliant writers ever stop writing. I’m proud to be on the same blog as them and all the other amazing Criminal Minds.