Conquering the Myths of the Writing Life

Is there such a thing as a happy writer? A creative person who doesn’t have a secret torment? An authorial genius absent of anxiety?

Fiction writer Douglas W. Millikin offers an honest and insightful essay about the biggest myths writers face about their profession, such as:

• Real writers must constantly and everyday be writing
• Depression is a muse
• Writers take to the bottle

Milliken himself has anxiety disorders that he’s seeking treatment for. While it pushed him forward at first, eventually it became destructive. He writes:

Angst-fueled ambition ceased to be a motivator. Instead of spurring me on, it wore me down. The more anxious I became, the less I wrote. The less I wrote, the more I drank. The more I drank, the deeper I sank into my depression and anxiety. And even as apparent as this self-destructive cycle was, justifying my actions came easily because there were the admirable precedents of addicts and suicides abounding on all sides. … I was buying into my mythologies, and getting exactly what I paid for. So how long do you have to tell yourself the same bogus story before you finally correct the narrative?

Read Milliken’s entire essay at Glimmer Train: A Weapon or a Crutch

Also this month at Glimmer Train:

• The Wars of Vocation by A. Campbell
• Punctuation Is when You Feel It by Noy Holland

Jane Friedman

Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.

Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.