Writing with a Chronic Illness: Creating a Writing Habit

Writing is a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.

So, how do you exercise this particular muscle when you have a chronic illness? You start with creating a writing habit, and a writing trigger.

Lucy tries out for the position of Muse

The Writing Habit

Creating a writing habit starts with showing up. Day in, day out, sitting down by the computer (or whatever is your writing instrument of choice) and writing something. Some days, it will be like pulling teeth, and others, it’s like transcribing from a mystical well of story deep inside. Those days are fun.

The writing habit is much like any other habit — it takes time to develop and not the supposed three weeks they’d like us to believe. Creating a habit, whether flossing or writing, takes three months or more. If you really want to be a writer, you have to show up every day of those three months. If, on your days off, you feel wrong about not writing, congratulations! You have successfully created a writing habit.

Ideally, the showing up should be at the same time in the same place every day. The Muse (and your writing muscle) is flighty and if you don’t pin her down, she’s going to swan off to look at butterflies. Trundling off to your computer right after breakfast every single day puts her (and you) on notice that you mean business. It also helps you get so immersed in what you’re writing that it starts to take over your life. That makes it a whole lot easier to just start typing, rather than having to find the tone and mood, and remember your character’s motivation.

I can hear all of you saying “but, but…!” out there. And I know. This writing habit stuff is a lot harder when you have a chronic illness or chronic pain. When you don’t know whether you’ll be able to get out of your PJs, committing to showing up and pinning down some recalcitrant Muse is a lot to ask.

So you show up in other ways. Maybe you don’t actively write on bad days, but you do a lot of thinking about your story. It can happen just in your mind, as well as on your computer or on a piece of paper. If you`re mainly thinking, keep something handy on which to make some notes so it doesn’t get lost. On days when the brain fog is as dense as peasoup fog, maybe you read a book or an article about writing. Perhaps you talk about writing, or maybe you fantasize about your fantastical future writing career.

The key is to make it writing part of your everyday. That’s how you show up.

A Writing Trigger

In a chronic illness community, there’s a lot of talk about triggers. They are usually things you don’t want in your life, because they trigger a flare or an episode of chronic pain, migraine, RA, Fibro, etc. A writing trigger, on the other hand, is something that nudges you to write and it’s something you can create yourself.

I recently accidentally created a writing trigger. In the first week of my vacation (actually, the first day), I was called back to work to write a few more articles that were time sensitive. By this time, I’d crashed after a high-production July and felt quite incapable of writing one more word. So I put together a survival kit in the hopes it would help get my brain going enough that the pieces would get done.

Not only did it get my brain going — that’s the benefit of drinking Coke when you’re normally un-caffeinated — but it worked so well that I decided to try it out when it came time to get back to my book. Within a few days, a mini-Coke and three Skippers had become not only part of my writing ritual, but a trigger. I pour the Coke into a glass, add a slice of lemon, and take a sip. This leads to an urge for a Skipper, and I go get three out of the bag. I eat one, and put the other two on the desk next to the keyboard. And then I start writing.

It has occurred to me that in the acknowledgements of my next book, I have to thank the Coca-Cola Company and Vermont Nut Free Chocolate for fuelling the writing.

Your trigger can be anything you want. It might be doing some gentle stretches or taking your meds with your morning cup of coffee or tea. Maybe it’s the rhythm of having breakfast, taking the dog for a walk, and then sitting down at the computer. Or perhaps you need to sing a 1990s power ballad first. If you do this every time you sit down to write, your subconscious will create a link and before you know it, the words will start spilling out anytime you hear this song

Which can get awkward in the supermarket, but there you have it. And the great thing about the trigger is that you don’t need to adapt anything because of your chronic illness. A trigger is a trigger.

How do you accommodate your chronic illness when you write?