Writing Lesson #412: The Three Stages of Insanity

When I’m writing a three-hundred-page novel, I struggle through three distinct, predictable stages.

Stage one: Grief
Amount of time it seems to occupy: Forty years
Number of pages it actually consumes: 140
Symptoms: Excessive moaning, groaning, and general inability to write, accompanied by frequent complaints of “How in the world does anyone ever put together all these words?!” and “Oh my god I have to write a zillion pages more!” Attempting to remember how I’ve already written a dozen novels that indeed have appeared on the shelves of Barnes and Nobles nationwide only convinces me that those were only a fluke. Obviously Or maybe magical pixies wrote them for me while I was sleeping. Because god knows that I am not talented or patient or crazy enough to write them myself.

Stage two: Elation
Amount of time it seems to occupy: Pages 145-150
Number of pages it actually consumes: Pages 145-150
Symptoms: A general feeling of peppiness, euphoria, benevolence, and goodwill to all. It’s accompanied by a confidence that all the struggle heretofore has been for the best, that the heavens have bestowed upon me a lovely premise that is going to turn out to be the finest book I have ever written. It is that moment that every writer lives for, when all is clear and lucid. And it lasts for roughly three hours before plunging into. . . .

Stage three: Panic
Amount of time it seems to occupy: Remember in college how you pulled all-nighters and kept awake sheerly from brute force, caffeine, and nerves? Like an entire week of that and no sleep whatsoever.
Number of pages it actually consumes: Pages 150-300
Symptoms: Screeching, irritability, and a certainty that you have created too much plot to fit in the amount of space you have left oh my god it’s all just going too fast and how in the world am I going to . . . Jane, stop this crazy thing! Sure signs you’re in this phase: your friends and loved ones shun and/or divorce you.

Gee, writing’s fun!

And you thought cat hacking only mean hairballs.

Fred is the most wired cat I know.

She has absorbed the fact that my laptop is constantly on, and feels it is her sworn duty to keep it busy when I’m off doing something else. She’s relatively well-behaved when I’m writing; she’ll simply sit on my chest and keep an eye on the screen and proofread for me, or point out when a scene is going wrong. When I close my word processor and move on to some other activity, however, there are no holds barred.

If I’m playing a game like World of Warcraft, for example, she’s right there with me, front elbows resting on the trackpad and eyes fixed on the action ahead. The other night when I parked a character in Honor Hold and abandoned the laptop for a few minutes, I came back to find my screen resolution changed, several mysterious messages typed into guild chat, all my bags open, and my poor character running across the surrounding desert at half health, with a train of five pigs attacking. She’s particularly on the alert for gnomes as she watches me play; if she sees one cross the screen, she’ll lunge and bat they away, a ferocious gleam in her eyes.

I’ve come back to the computer to find applications open that I definitely had nothing to do with. Once she managed to find the keypad combination (I don’t even know what it is!) to open Front Row, so she could listen to my music. She runs Google searches for me on a regular basis, usually on random topics that interest her, like F\\\\\\\\\\\FFFFFF (I think it’s hacker language).

And then yesterday, while I was making dinner, she parked herself on my keyboard and began sending instant messages to my friends. One of them was something like ten lines long and consisted entirely of random gobbledygook . . . or she’d have me think. Because at the very end of the last one, right before she pushed the enter key, she typed, and I quote: j/k.

As in just kidding.

Don’t tell me she doesn’t know what she’s doing.

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