“All Writers are Depressed”

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I wish I had the reference now, but a few months ago I was reading a successful writer’s blog and came across the unhedged statement that all writers are depressed. A quick google search shows that there’s an element of truth to this.

Me, I’m happy as a clam, except when I’m miserable, which mostly centers around my job as a pathologist. It’s always been that way, even during residency.

And there are a few other things that have “always” been there for me.

For instance, I always feel much colder than other people – unless I’m in cold water with a wet suit on, then they’re colder. I’m always more anxious than most people I know, though I try hard to hide it and often succeed, I think.

These things should have been a clue. Here are some other clues that could have helped me:

Slow movement
Slow speech
Prominent bags under my eyes
Cool skin
Slow pulse
Low blood pressure
Loss of the outer third of eyebrows
Brittle nails
Red face with exercise
A tendency to be slow to heat up even in a sauna
Hoarseness for no apparent reason
Accelerated worsening of eyesight or hearing
Mood swings, especially anxiety
Gum problems
Various burning or tingling sensations that come and go….
…
Bottom line: you could be depressed and anxious due to hypothyroidism and yet have normal T4, T3 and TSH values, and a brilliant, concerned MD standing beside you telling you that you definitely do NOT have hypothyroidism.

Trust me on this.

I was close friends with a psychiatrist who told me that he never could understand how to interpret a thyroid panel. He likened it to the macroeconomics I was trying to beat him over the head with in the context of an ongoing political argument that finally destroyed our friendship.

I mention this so you won’t write off undiagnosed “mild” hypothyroidism as a fad or a fringe development. It’s a complex issue for everyone involved, myself included.

I’m a pathologist, for goodness sake, a clinical laboratory guy, and I did not know how easy it is to miss this diagnosis by “treating the numbers instead of the patient.”

I discovered that I have hypothyroidism of long standing. It has gone undiagnosed all my adult life because my blood tests (TSH and thyroid panel) have always been within the “normal” ranges (up until the last test which showed only a slightly elevated TSH).

I recommend you read Thyroid Power by Richard Shames, M.D., et al. if you’re overly anxious or at all depressed, even just intermittently about specific things.

Long story short: I took my first thyroid meds (a T3 and T4 combo, not just T4) yesterday morning and within five minutes felt my legs go from cold (the usual) to warm. Yesterday I felt as normal emotionally as I ever did when I was a kid. I could think about my job without a sense of impending doom, disaster, and free-floating fear. I suddenly wanted to go out and do something outside, rather than sit in the house. I suddenly wasn’t craving food and caffeine all day. My mind was sharper, despite a poor night’s sleep the night before. I scored in my top 5 scores on a Lumosity game, for heaven’s sake!

The book claims that 10% of the population has hypothyroidism. If true, it’s astounding. Not everyone who’s depressed or anxious has hypothyroidism, and vice versa, but wow, with numbers like 10%, there’s bound to be significant overlap. There was for me.

Hypothyroidism can run in families. It’s difficult to diagnose because the tests are not as sensitive as most docs think. And the doctors, myself (previously) included, almost all believe that a normal TSH and a normal thyroid panel exclude (rule out) hypothyroidism. Baaaaaamp! Wrong answer!

Chances are, if you have “mild” hypothyroidism that is causing anxiety and any degree of depression, your numbers are going to come back “normal” and you’re going to need to educate your doctor. That is going to be next to impossible, but if you read the book and memorize parts of it, you may have a fighting chance if you’re a confident person and an effective talker.

A better approach would be to shop around for a doctor who already knows what’s going on with the latest thyroid tests and current knowledge of the disease. Even though I’m a pathologist, I went that route, and found a doc who isn’t an MD. I forget what he is, I’ll go look it up…

He’s boarded in Naturopathic Medicine.

My dad was an MD – so was his dad – so am I. We kids were raised to believe that there are MD’s and there are quacks. Nothing between. I don’t believe that anymore. Hopefully you never did.

Sometimes the “experts” are not at the cutting edge. It’s like that in every field I’ve explored, including fiction writing and archaeology. Being able to think outside your own box is possible only if you discover that you’re in one. Then you’ve got to value objectivity more than the sound of your own voice.

Be happy. Keep writing. Your story could open minds and save our species from itself. You are that good.

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

…

If you’re interested in glimpsing strategies for depression, and don’t mind hearing from an opinionated nineteen-year-old girl in another universe, my in-progress novel may be a helpful read. She’s a genius geneticist with a younger brother who struggles with depression. Her evolving story starts here (as a “one-page” document).

It’s an experimental novel called, Hapa Girl DNA, and is a “hapa” thing itself – a hybrid of fiction / non-fiction. Hapa is Hawaiian for “half,” and Johanna, the protagonist, is half Japanese and half Jewish. In writing her novel, she and I ignore some important fiction-writing rules, because we both like to question dogmas and test things.

But the “rules” are essential knowledge to anyone crazy enough to either break them or follow them thoughtlessly.

So you could download my e-book on fiction writing, the second to last chapter of which gives my current opinions on many of the dogmatic rules of fiction writing. Downloading that will place you on my short list of people who wouldn’t mind being notified when my traditional novel is done – possibly before the next ice age. (No spam or sharing of your info. I haven’t even written to my list yet. It’s been over a year.)

Next time you’re writing emails, if you think of it, please tell your best and hopefully weirdest friend about my blog (www.storiform.com). Thanks! I appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Talmage

My Show-Don’t-Tell Obsession

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7-30-09 Mt Bachelor and Museum 012

If the sharpest tool in the box is description, and hearing J.T. Bushnell explain it (previous post) was a breakthrough for me, does the rule “show don’t tell” deserve my obsessive compulsive devotion from now on?

I’m reading “The First 50 Pages,” by Jeff Gerke. He’s telling me that if I break the rule “show don’t tell” in my first fifty pages, my story will be instantly rejected by the professional slush pile browsers. He says he ought to know, he’s read the beginnings of thousands of submitted stories and has rejected almost all of them, and for what he thinks are good reasons. He tells exactly why he rejected stories and what the criteria were. He discusses these problems in detail. It’s compelling the way he’s put it all together. Yes, buy the book, by all means and read it, but Jeez…

It threw me into a slow-mo panic.

I went back to my first chapter and started deleting all kinds of important stuff about Johanna. I don’t want to “tell” the readers that she has a condition called “perfect autobiographical memory” or that she’s related to an ancient Samurai. I don’t want to “tell” about how she blames herself for the kidnapping of her brother. I’ve got to make up scenes that naturally cover all this important stuff. Boy is that going to be contrived and boring. At one point I have her looking at a picture of her family and “telling” about how her parents died. I cut most of that, too. And I’m feeling the sleeves of this “How To Write” straitjacket pulling my arms back again. I don’t like it.

It always seems to me that the people who are actually selling novels in copious quantities are breaking a lot of the rules. What about this one? I googled “show don’t tell, exceptions in popular fiction?” And guess what…

I found this:

LEE CHILD DEBUNKS THE BIGGEST WRITING MYTHS

Sweet!

“In his ThrillerFest session “Tell, Don’t Show: Why Writing Rules are Mostly Wrong,” Child battled a few of the biggest writing myths out there, and explained what really keeps a reader reading until The End.”

I like this guy already. I’m going to go buy one of his books now. Meanwhile, here’s a bit more of the article on Child’s heretical views…

Picture this: In a novel, a character wakes up and looks at himself in the mirror, noting his scars and other physical traits for the reader.

“It is completely and utterly divorced from real life,” Child said.

So why do writers do this? Child said it’s because they’ve been beaten down by the rule of Show, Don’t Tell. “They manufacture this entirely artificial thing.”

“We’re not story showers,” Child said. “We’re story tellers.”

Child said there’s nothing wrong with simply saying the character was 6 feet tall, with scars.

After all, he added—do your kids ever ask you to show them a story? They ask you to tell them a story. Do you show a joke? No, you tell it.

“There is nothing wrong with just telling the story,” Child said. “So liberate yourself from that rule.”

Child believes the average reader doesn’t care at all about telling, showing, etc. He or she just wants something to latch onto, something to carry them through the book. By following too many “rules,” you can lose your readers.

OK, I’m back. I bought “Killing Floor,” the first of a best-selling series about (a first person POV character) Jack Reacher. I just read the first chapter. Wow. Now I respect Child’s opinions. The guy can write. Especially for an average reader like me. Like I? No. Forget I asked.

Part of the reason why Child is able to disagree so easily with the show-don’t-tell dogma is that he’s writing in first person. When you do that, the telling sounds a lot less like telling, I’ve noticed. Here’s what I mean…

In third person it sounds like “telling” for sure:

“Johanna’s luck brought her perfect autobiographical memory, a gift that provided straight A’s, double grade skipping and, according to the scant literature, a tendency toward pathologic grudge holding and major depression.”

That was telling. Someone slap my wrists. But now I’ll write it in first person and it will sound a lot less like an info dump of “telling,” and more like a new friend of yours letting you in on an intimate secret:

“It turns out I’m mental. Something called perfect autobiographical memory. It’s so rare the shrinks don’t know much, other than I’m going to grow up to be an unforgiving ass who probably murders herself.”

Man, I wish I had the guts to write a female protagonist in first person! (Update edit: I finally got the nerve to do it, here.) There is so much I want to “tell” my readers. I’m an ideas guy. I want to chat with my readers about stuff that interests me as I write my stories. If I wrote in first person I could get away with a lot more of it. In third person, I’m thinking I’m going to get tossed into the trash somewhere in the first fifty pages.

Hmm.

Help me out, somebody, please. Seriously, tell me how you deal with this dilemma.

Thanks!

…

M. Talmage Moorehead

PS: I did some more searching on this topic and found an article that casts a realistic light on the subject: pcwrede.com/show-vs-tell

…

If you’re interested in intelligent design, weird artifacts, genetics and psychology from the perspective of a nineteen-year-old “Hapa Girl,” my in-progress novel may be a fun read. The protagonist, Johanna, is a genius geneticist with a younger brother who struggles with depression, though you wouldn’t know it to meet him. Her evolving story starts here.

It’s an experiment called, Hapa Girl DNA, and is a hybrid itself – a tightrope crossing of fiction and non-fiction. “Hapa” is the Hawaiian term for “half.” Johanna is half Japanese and half Jewish. In writing her novel, she and I ignore some important fiction-writing rules, partly because we like to test dogmas and partly because it’s fun to try new things.

But the “rules” are essential knowledge to anyone crazy enough to either break them or follow them mindlessly.

So you could download my e-book on fiction writing, the second to last chapter of which gives my current opinions on many of the dogmatic rules of fiction writing. Downloading that 10,000 word file will place you on my short list of people who will be politely notified when my traditional novel is done – possibly before the next ice age. (No spam or sharing of your info. I haven’t sent an email to my list yet. It’s been over a year.)

Next time you’re writing emails, if you think of it, please tell your best and hopefully weirdest friend about my blog (www.storiform.com). Thanks! I appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Talmage