Years ago, I stumbled across a quote by Franz Kafka that instantly became my favorite writing quote of all time:

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”

I found the quote to be brilliant, witty, dark yet relatable. You see, I’d always been the kind of writer who, after going more than a few days without writing, would start to lose his mind. I never became homicidal or anything like that; just a little moody on busy weekends and maybe a teensy bit psychotic during family vacations. In other words, quirky and fun!

I’d joke with my wife and friends, saying things like, “Wow, if I get like this after just a couple of days away from my manuscript, imagine how dangerous I’d be if I ever experienced an extended bout of writer’s block.”

And then something hilarious happened: I experienced an extended bout of writer’s block.

Actually, what I’ve been dealing with for the past year and a half is less a bout of writer’s block and more a bout of writer’s blah. That is, I’ve simply lost—or perhaps just badly misplaced—my passion for crafting fiction.

It all started around the time I moved from Austin, Texas to Sydney, Australia roughly two years ago. I initially chalked up my decreased writing mojo to the huge cultural and geographic change that came with the move. The way the toilet water down here in the Southern Hemisphere flushes in the opposite direction, I thought maybe the same thing was happening with my creative juices. I just needed to give them time to recalibrate, to get used to them flowing clockwise.

Adding to my problems was the stunning natural beauty here in Sydney. It didn’t exactly help restore my creativity or desire to write. I mean, c’mon—how in the hell can anyone be expected to crank out compelling stories filled with murder and violence and unspeakable cruelty when surrounded by breathtaking beaches and sea cliffs? Every morning I’d open my window shades, exposing all the sunlight and tropical birds and magnificent gum trees, then mutter to myself, “I’m f*cked.”

The longer I went without writing, the more I could feel the crazy creeping in. And I soon realized that, if I didn’t start putting up a fight, I was going to become a total cliché—just another writer who lost his mind and allowed himself to waste away to nothing.

As much as I had always loved the Kafka quote cited earlier, I was determined to not let it define me, to not allow it to run my life, to keep it from ruining the remainder of my days.

Yeah, that didn’t work.

The more I tried to convince myself that I could set writing aside and still live a normal, fulfilling, even happy life, the more evident it became that I might need to start wearing a helmet at all times and move into a ground-floor apartment with padded walls and dull cutlery.

Still, I persisted. I viewed every day as a new opportunity to prove Franz wrong, to show his ghost and the world that I could continue my sabbatical from fiction without succumbing to insanity.

How naïve of me.

Below are three key actions I took that serve to highlight my failure to fend off the CRAZY:

1) I started embracing the present moment. All the mental health websites and experts and Instagram hippies are always highlighting the importance of being present, of paying attention to and appreciating what’s going on in each moment you have the good fortune to be alive.

Huge mistake. Especially if you are a fiction writer—and double-especially if you are non-writing fiction writer. You see, embracing the present is the opposite of escape, and escape is the dream of all fictionistas. By focusing on present reality—on the people and things all around you at any given moment—you are quickly reminded that the world is a giant dumpster fire filled with chaos and mattress commercials and an utter lack of punctuation. The only way to emerge with your sanity intact is to create alternative realities and build imaginary worlds. And the only thing worse than being conscious of that fact is being conscious of the fact that you’ve lost your will or ability to do such building and creating.

Thus, the more I meditated and showed gratitude for my time on this planet, the more I spiraled—pining for the days when I used to be able to effortlessly spend hours immersed in a well thought-out murder scene.

2) I started focusing on others. They say the happiest people are those who make their lives about others and not just themselves. In my experience, that is true only if the other people you make your life about are imaginary.

Back when my life revolved around creating characters and helping them overcome tremendous conflict involving life-or-death stakes, I was in heaven. So, naturally, when my creativity and passion for writing suddenly went poof, so did my contentment, my zest for life, my reason for bathing. But rather than just wallow in misery and emotional anguish, I decided to embrace what Buddha and Jesus and other notable motivational speakers have been yammering on about for centuries: I decided to make my life about other people besides just myself and the despicable criminals I’ve lovingly brought into existence.

The trouble is, almost all of the “other people” I know are also writers and, unfortunately, they are productive and mentally stable ones at that. So, while I tried to put them first and offer them support and cheer them on, those bastards ended up being a constant reminder of just how much I’d fallen off as a writer, just how lost I was as an artist, just how many dozens of dollars a year more than me they were earning from their books.

I thought about making some new friends and trying to make them the focus of my life, but then I realized something very important, something Buddha and Jesus forgot to put at the forefront of their teachings: People are the worst.

3) I started looking for a full-time job. It wasn’t until I decided to seek gainful employment and try to carve out a nice career for myself outside of writing that I realized just how mentally ill I’d become. Sure, in the past I had toyed around with the idea of a traditional full-time job to replace the odd little side hustles that helped to bolster my fiction income, but I was never crazy enough to actually work on my resume or think a reputable company would ever look at it and go, “Now here’s a strong candidate!”

In theory, it made sense why a crime fiction writer who’d seemingly lost the will to write crime fiction would start thinking about ways to pay the bills without resorting to actual crime. But in reality, people whose top three areas of knowledge are poison methods, body disposal, and poison methods tend not to get invited in or back for interviews by a hiring manager whose name isn’t Lefty or Crusher or Trump.

So, there I was—unable to write crime fiction, and unable to see just how un-hirable years of only writing crime fiction had made me. Even worse, months and months of not writing had evidently left me too insane to remember just how crazy someone has to be to want to be hirable.

The good (or maybe the bad) news: I’ve slowly started to get my writing groove back.

The bad (or maybe the good) news: I recently landed a full-time job. (One that centers around my second biggest passion in life—skiing. More specifically, helping Australians plan ski/snowboard trips to Japan, North America, and New Zealand. I always knew I’d someday build a career in the snow travel industry while living in a city surrounded by beaches inside a giant sunburnt country.)

The (Rock) Bottom Line

So what does this all mean? It means Kafka wasn’t kidding around when he said what he said about non-writing writers and insanity. Now, I’m not saying writers should never quit or never take an extended break from writing; but just know that if you are a writer and you ever do stop writing—whether by choice or otherwise—you risk going so far off your rocker you’ll end up doing such dangerous and nonsensical things as embracing reality, putting others before yourself, and sending out resumes.

And I wouldn’t wish any of that on anyone—not even my worst enemy, or a good friend who sells more books than I do.

Most people are familiar with “the five stages of grief” introduced by renowned Swiss-American psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her groundbreaking 1969 book, On Death and Dying. As a writer, I often think about death, dying and grief—to, you know, cheer myself up. And it recently dawned on me that the way Kübler-Ross described how humans deal with the loss of a loved one is quite similar to how writers deal with rejection. The thing is, though, loved ones die only once, where a manuscript can go on to die several dozen deaths.

So, yeah, being a writer is more tragic than being a human.

Now, I’m definitely not saying I would cry less over the death of a loved one than I would over my fiction getting rejected. And the reason I’m not saying that is some of my loved ones read this blog.

I’ve made my point. It’s time now to lighten the mood by taking a closer look at writerly death and pain. Below I apply the famed Kübler-Ross model to manuscript rejection and describe how the totally unbearable devastation a writer experiences upon being rejected eventually gets processed to become only mostly unbearable devastation.

STAGE 1: Denial. Upon learning their work has been rejected, the first thing a writer experiences is a strong sense of “there’s no way that actually happened.” This usually entails convincing themselves the agent or publisher they submitted their work to suffered a stroke in the midst of reading it, resulting in moderate to severe brain damage and rendering said agent/publisher susceptible to wildly irrational decisions. Denial may also take the form of the writer pretending they never even submitted their work to the person or entity in question, chalking up the whole rejection to the fact that the publishing world is undoubtedly conspiring against them.

STAGE 2: Anger. Once the denial starts to subside—which generally happens within a day or two of receiving the rejection but can last until the end of time—feelings of anger, resentment and even blind rage will move in and spoil the writer’s drinking binge. Most of this ire will be aimed at the person or publishing house that issued the rejection, but it’s not at all uncommon for the writer to (mis)direct a lot of anger at family, friends, neighbors, former English teachers, pets, traffic, anyone ahead of them in line at the supermarket, and, last but certainly not least, the universe.

Fortunately, such anger rarely if ever escalates into violence—unless the writer remains conscious during this stage.

STAGE 3: Bargaining. The anger following a rejection usually lasts only a day or so before the writer realizes all is not lost, so long as they remain desperate for validation and willing to blatantly lie to regain a sense of control. A typical scenario might feature a recently rejected writer promising God or the universe or their favorite stuffed animal that, if the manuscript in question is accepted soon, she or he will be a better person going forward—one who doesn’t alienate friends and family to write; one who doesn’t drink or do drugs or watch The Bachelor to escape their writing failures; one who does start to bathe regularly and occasionally wear pants. However, as with all psychological bargaining, such promises are innately impossible to keep.

STAGE 4: Depression. This stage can be difficult for friends and family of the writer to spot, as 97.3% of writers are depressed regardless of whether or not they’ve recently been rejected. Still, the depression that descends upon a writer following the bargaining stage is generally a big one—the kind that makes most writers consider giving up writing for good and taking a job at a sewage treatment facility as an unpaid intern, which, oddly enough, pays triple what fiction writing does. Additional telltale signs of rejection-based depression include:

• sleeping in the same pajamas for weeks … in a public park;
• folding each page of the manuscript into pill-size and using them to replace previously prescribed antidepressants;
• pretending to have friends, then refusing to answer their calls.

STAGE 5: Acceptance. Rejection grief finally comes to an end during the acceptance stage—that is unless the writer gets confused and thinks the acceptance stage refers to their manuscript finally being accepted. Those writers—following several hours of intense joy and elation before learning the truth—are usually dead within a week. Fortunately though, such confusion occurs with only about 48% of writers, thus the majority of scribes survive the agony of rejection and go on to live long and unsuccessful lives.   

I look forward to receiving your comments and thoughts about this piece, and to rejecting any that don’t perfectly align with my views.

It’s 2:48 a.m. and I’m awake because an under-developed fictional person who lives inside my head insisted on ripping me from my slumber to discuss some plot points for the story he’s set to star in.

Just an average Monday night/Tuesday morning for me.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining. I actually welcome these sorts of disruptions to my sleep, my silence, my sanity.

That’s the problem.

You see, fiction writing is a sickness. An addiction as glorious as it is gut-wrenching, as sublime as it is shameful. I couldn’t live without writing novels and short stories—and they’ll surely be the death of me.

And apparently I’m okay with that.

I’ve never considered myself a masochist before, but the more I examine the evidence, masochism’s really the only explanation. Why else would I continue to go all in on my fiction, even after getting my heart broken and my soul crushed by so many near misses over the years, including—but certainly not limited to—the following:  

• Two TV options—one with HBO, one with Showtime—that didn’t get renewed at the wire.
• A third TV option (with another major network) that died just prior to the contract being signed;
• A late-stage rejection by a big literary agent. NOTE: I did finally land a different and even more amazing agent last year, so I no longer even think about the previously mentioned rejection as a “near miss.” Still, guess what happened right after signing with my amazing agent mere days before she was planning on submitting my manuscript to several big crime fiction publishers? Just a little thing called Covid-19. (Not that the pandemic has brought publishing to its knees, but it might make some major houses a little less likely to take a chance on a relatively unknown author like me.)

Sound like a whole lot of whining and whingeing on my part? On the surface, maybe, but don’t be fooled. Deep down, and not even that deep, I love my failures, my misfortune, my poor timing. Of course I do—I’m a writer. We’re not truly happy unless we’re miserable.

The truth is, near misses only make me stronger. Well, my addiction stronger, anyway. Every incident of almost-but-not-quite feeds my disease, fuels it, compels me to continue forsaking most of my responsibilities and alienating my friends and family in pursuit of my lifelong dream of landing a solid traditional book deal—a book deal that seems to creep closer and closer but never quite materializes. A book deal that, if I’m lucky, would provide me with a fraction of what I would make if I spent a little less time writing and a little more time working even just a steady entry-level job.

That’s right, I’ve got full-on, stop-for-nothing tunnel vision that, best case scenario, might eventually lead to me earning enough to cover a year’s worth of nights at an extended stay motel after my wife throws my ass out for my fiction problem.

Making matters worse, or better—I’ve forgotten which—are the little victories I’ve managed to achieve via my writing over the years: the handful of indie author awards; the starred review from Publishers Weekly; the solid number of favorable reader reviews on Amazon; my favorite author telling me I have “it” (whatever “it” is). Each of these positive but by no means monumental achievements is the equivalent of a neighborhood drug dealer handing me a sample of the good stuff, knowing I’ll get hooked and stay hooked and keep coming back for more—even beg for some when I don’t have the funds to cover it.

Now you may be thinking, Isn’t the title of this post The Shame and the GLORY of Fiction Addiction? Where’s the glory part, Greg?

Well, the odd thing is, my answer to the “glory” question is perhaps the most shameful thing about all of this. For, you see, all or most of the glory that comes with fiction addiction occurs inside the head of the afflicted, inside the mind of the writer.

It’s the internal mania that floods a writer’s amygdala every time they fire off a killer sentence or paragraph or scene—hell, sometimes even just a strong verb.

It’s the delusions of grandeur that take over whenever a writer hears a compliment or sees four or five stars tethered to a review of their book.

It’s the nearly lethal levels of euphoria that send a writer skyward whenever they type the magic words “THE END” after months or years of pulling characters’ teeth and rolling a heavy plot up a jagged mountain.

And, of course, it’s all the near misses before they become near misses. All the little victories before hard evidence reveals those victories aren’t going to evolve into much larger ones.

But perhaps the greatest glory of fiction addiction is this: there is no cure. As shameful as it may be for a writer to keep plugging away and grinding and hustling and hoping and dreaming against all odds, there’s something supremely glorious about the fact that such agonizing persistence will never stop.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s 4:07 a.m., and that unstable, underdeveloped character I mentioned at the outset—the one who woke me up to talk about his tale—he’s got a box-cutter to my throat and won’t set me free me until he’s said his piece and gets his way.

Like I said, shameful.

And glorious.

Any of you out there have a creative pursuit that often feels more like an addiction? I'd love to hear about it—that way I'll feel less like a freak. 

I had heard of them. I’d even seen some of their pre-dawn tweets upon sitting down to write at 9 a.m. like a normal human. These folks would claim such absurd things as having just added 2,000 words to their novel-in-progress—with an hour to spare before even grabbing breakfast.

I used to just scoff at these “#5amwritersclub” participants. I’d dismiss them as maniacs. Freaks. Members of a dangerous cult.

And now, suddenly, I’m one of them.

No, nobody tricked or manipulated or deceived me into becoming a member. I wasn’t strong-armed or blackmailed or drugged. I simply woke up one morning at 4:30 and started writing ... and knew I’d never be the same. (Including never being able to stay up past 9 again.)

Anyway, here we are, five paragraphs into this post, which is probably a good time to get to the main point of it. And the main point is there are many benefits of waking up to write before even God gets out of bed. Following are seven reasons why I’ll never stop setting my alarm for 4:30 a.m. to write (at least until Daylight Saving Time starts again in March).

The silence. I’ve been wearing noise-canceling headphones to write for years and thus am used to relative quiet while screaming at my characters. But nothing quite compares to the blissful silence I experience now that I wear my noise-canceling headphones even when there’s no noise to cancel. The only sounds I hear these days while putting my protagonist through hell is the dull, harmonic tapping of the keyboard keys and the occasional muted crunch of my fist going through drywall whenever my protagonist refuses to cooperate. Such overall quietude has been wonderful for my creativity and fosters a true sense of calmness in the middle of murder scenes.     

The stillness. No, stillness is not the same as silence. It could be perfectly quiet inside a writing office while squirrels have a death-match in a tree right outside your window. But at 4:30 a.m., there aren’t any squirrels—squirrels aren’t stupid enough to get up in the middle of the night to work on their novel. Thus, in addition to the glorious lack of sound while I’m writing, there’s no movement to wreak havoc on my ADHD. In fact, I’ve never been more—

SQUIRREL!

Sorry about that—I’m writing this blog post in the middle of the day.

The darkness. There being so little light outside when I sit down at my writing desk each morning not only inspires me and informs the dark themes I write about but also makes it hard to see and get distracted by any homicidal squirrels. I keep the lights off in my office to further feed off the ethereal and haunting predawn energy, as well as to keep any neighbors who may be awake from catching me act out any fights or stabbings or sex scenes I’m working on. (I once forgot to keep the lights off, and the next day the house next door had a “For Sale” sign up.)    

The propulsion. When you catch a creative wave and ride it for hours into breakfast, it propels you through the rest of the day like nothing I can think of other than amphetamines. I emerge from my writing office at 7 a.m. with the energy and force of a tsunami, gleefully knocking over anything in my path. My puppy loves it; my wife dives for cover and threatens divorce.   

The “hustle factor.” There’s a lot to be said about hustling and grinding and showing grit and moxy as a writer. Most of it is said by the writers themselves. Still, it does feel damn good to soldier up and overcome the challenge of not having time to write by waking up every morning hours before any sane person would just so you can work on a book nobody’s ever going to read.

The excuses. When you wake up at 4:30 a.m. and make sure everyone you know knows it, it gives you a lot of leverage for getting out of doings things you don’t want to do and seeing people you don’t want to see. For example:

“Darn it, buddy—I’d really love to come over for a dinner party with proper social distancing that we both know won’t actually be adhered to after all the guests finish their second drink, but I’ve got my pesky manuscript to work on right around the time you’ll be getting out of bed to throw up.” 

Or:

“Shoot, honey—streaming Sex and the City reruns with you does sound like fun, but whoa, look at the time. I need to be awake, like, an hour ago. That next novel of mine isn’t going to write itself.”

Or:

"So sorry, neighbor, a puppy play-date this afternoon at 5:00 would be great—if only it didn’t encroach on my bedtime."  

The hashtag. There’s an indescribably powerful sense of pride and honor that comes with being able to legitimately add “#5amwritersclub” to a tweet—knowing that all the other authors who are awake and tweeting on Twitter instead of actually working on their book will see it.

How about YOU? How badly do you want to punch me in the face for even THINKING of encouraging you to wake up at such a ridiculously early hour to do ANYTHING, let alone WRITE? Share in the comments section below.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of being a writer—apart from the laughably low pay and the staggering loneliness and the pressure to choose all the right words to fill all the blank pages—is dealing with rejection.

Every writer, whether it’s a hugely popular author or an author more like me, has to cope with some form of rejection in their career. It may be a literary agent rejecting their query, a publisher rejecting their manuscript, or a pawnbroker rejecting their typewriter. Point is, rejection in the writing and publishing world is universal. I have a couple of fully stuffed filing cabinets to prove it, though I can’t open either of them due to all the damage they’ve sustained from being punched and kicked.

That all said, rejection needn’t be so painful. While I acknowledge it’s hard not letting a “NO” stop your flow, I assure you there are ways to lessen the sting of literary rejection—some that don’t even require prescription pharmaceuticals or more illicit drugs or voluntary euthanasia.

Below are just a few.

(Note: While this piece is intended for writers, nearly all of the tactics can be applied to non-writers and OTHER types of sane people looking to cope with rejection.)  

5) Befriend only bad writers. Whoever wrote “misery loves company” was a genius and thus not the kind of writer you should be friends with. No, you want to surround yourself with hacks—writers who are kind and generous but who lack any real talent. That way you’ll be too busy hearing about all their rejections to have time to dwell on and mope too much about your own. And isn’t feeling slightly superior to others really what friendship’s all about?

4) Marry an optimist. If you’re a writer who’s been at it a while but has yet to make a living from writing (in other words, 99.974% of all writers), chances are high you’re not an optimist. Years of rejection have a way of breeding new strains of pessimism. Therefore it’s wise to choose as your life partner someone who’ll drown you in smiles and encouragement and cheerleading chants so you don’t drown yourself in a lake after receiving your next “NO” from an agent or publisher or pawnbroker.  

3) Develop and cultivate delusions of grandeur. Just because you aren’t an optimist doesn’t mean you can’t be delusional. Where optimism is a positive state of mind that requires a lot of effort, delusions of grandeur are positive signs of mental illness and thus very achievable for most writers. If you’re lucky, your delusions will enable you to convince yourself that you’ve been getting rejected because you’re actually too talented. I have a friend who’s fortunate enough to be crazy enough to believe agents and publishers reject him out of their fear he’s going to be too huge an author for them to handle. He’s certain they’d rather pass on his books than go through the inevitable grief and heartbreak of losing him to a more prestigious entity. You’ve never seen such a confident unpublished author! It’s beautiful.

2) Be placed into a medically induced coma. Admittedly this is sort of an outlandish approach, but then so is writing novels for money or enjoyment. The good news is being placed into a medically induced coma is a surefire way to not only lessen the sting of rejection but also lose weight while getting time off from your loathsome day job. Think of it as going on a peaceful yoga retreat without the worst part—the yoga.

1) Reject rejection. This is perhaps the most powerful way to deal with rejection, and thus the most dangerous, and thus the most fun. It’s like delusions of grandeur’s much tougher cousin, as it’s a lot more active and daring than merely losing your mind. Rejecting rejection requires a writer to stare straight into the eye of each “Thank you but no” email they receive and, without flinching or punching a filing cabinet, say, “Uh uh—thank YOU but no” or “Sorry but I cannot accept your lack of acceptance.” Or something even more badass, if that’s even possible.  

What are some of YOUR tips for lessening the sting of rejection? (Don’t feel bad if I don’t accept them.)