After yet another sleepless night, I begin my day by pondering the question: am I a writer or am I perhaps schizophrenic? I daresay I am not alone in asking this question. I'm quite certain that most authors experience similar worries. When you spend your day creating an alternate world, it's difficult not to question your sanity at some point.
I begin my research by looking up my potential mental illness. From Wikipedia's entry on schizophrenia: "Common symptoms include auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking ..." Hmm, I will look at these issues one by one and see if I can answer my question.
Auditory hallucinations. Put a big fat check mark in this column. One of the things keeping me up at night is the voices of my characters, both beloved and not. A few nights ago, I had a warrior from the fantasy novel I'm currently writing telling me in no uncertain terms that he was displeased with how I had written his handling of a certain situation. He felt that my description of his actions made him seem incompetent (I did tell him that I thought 'incompetent' was a rather harsh word to use, but he was fairly adamant about it). At any rate, he wouldn't shut up - which is fairly odd for him as he's not usually that loquacious, and I finally had to get out of bed at 4:30 am to rewrite the scene in order to gain his approval and get some sleep. Of course, the fact that our little argument took place in a strange language that I invented may seem odd, but what could I do? The guy doesn't speak English!
He's not the only character to interrupt my sleep cycle. Another has now taken to telling me that she wants more lines. Sometimes, I imagine it's what a producer on a movie set must feel like - you have all these competing personalities and you're trying to make them all happy so the production (book in this case) goes smoothly.
And if those two weren't enough, among my chatty characters are also two obnoxious cats and a gentle puppy. You should hear some of the things those cats say. It's downright disturbing.
Paranoid or bizarre delusions. Well, I'm split on this (it's okay for me to say that, I already ruled out a dissociative identity disorder), so I'll give myself a check mark in both the have and don't have columns for this one. I don't consider myself particularly paranoid (although my overworked paper shredder might disagree), but bizarre delusions? I write fantasy novels. Of course I have bizarre delusions. The entire world is a figment of my imagination ... or is it? Wait. Am I the only one that heard evil laughter just now? Anyway, when you spend almost every waking hour working out the details of an imaginary world in your head, it's difficult not to get lost in it at times. This is true even if it's not a fantasy world because I have many of the same issues when I work on modern, take-place-in-this-world novels. Every activity you become involved in during the day raises the inevitable questions: how would character X react to this? How would it work in his/her world? Would this even exist/happen in his/her world? Why or why not? Then your imagination starts answering those questions and off you go into bizarre delusion land.
One good thing about my bizarre delusions? I'm never alone. My peeps go everywhere with me. Of course, there is a downside to that - some of those fantasy realm people are not fond of automobiles. They amount of screaming and gasping coming from them in my mind if I fail to brake more than 100 yards before a traffic light is just alarming, and don't get me started on their reactions to computers, television, telephones and other technology.
Disorganized speech and thinking. Check mark in the have column, but it's not my fault. I blame the bizarre delusions. Okay, that did sound a little crazy, I admit, but you see it's only my reactions to those writing-induced delusions that may cause others to perceive me as having the aforementioned symptoms. I've found myself walking down the aisle of a store having a conversation and then re-having it multiple times in a (hopefully) better-worded fashion in an attempt to remember it so I can write it down once I'm home. I usually only realize that I'm doing this aloud when people start hurriedly looking the other way or grabbing the hands of small children and running. I think I shall start walking around with an earpiece in so people will assume that I'm on the phone, rather than insane.
I have to say that having examined the symptoms and my behavior, I'm not sure an outsider would be able to positively conclude that I am, in fact, not schizophrenic. I mean I spend hours a day lost in an imaginary world, speaking an imaginary language and talking to imaginary people. It doesn't sound sane, does it? It's a good thing I know the truth: I'm just a writer who spends hours in front of a keyboard writing fictional stories for entertainment purposes ... or am I actually a fictional character that some author somewhere is writing about as she attempts to delve into her psyche looking for the answers to her own existence and blogging about it. Oh dear, I may have to look into the whole dissociative disorder thing again.
