In this blog post, I will briefly discuss my approach to writing about schizophrenia and psychosis, mental health, and family and relationships that culminated in my novel “The Overlife, A Tale Of Schizophrenia.”
As I mentioned in another blog post, I have kept a mental health diary for a long time. The diary grew out of my inability to convey to doctors and people I knew, including family, exactly what I experienced when fighting the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. I eventually found a psychotherapist and psychologist willing to read my diary before treating me. That commitment was the start of a treatment by such doctors that was effective for me and remains so.
I found three types of note-taking to help consolidate a novel. The first is my laptop, which I use when my ideas are well-formed and can be written down quickly. The second is a large notebook with letter-sized pages where I write down ideas and try to turn them into something well-defined and longer. I prefer to write by hand for this process as I can see the evolution of my changes. Even though my notebook looks messy, it makes sense to me, and by choosing letter-sized pages, there is lots of room for margin notes. The third is a small notebook I can carry around conveniently. There, I jot down ideas as they come to me while I go about my day and am not necessarily near my desk.
For me, it is essential that the small notebook and its accompanying pen look attractive. Plenty of notebooks and pens in bookstores and online are inexpensive yet inviting, and their attraction helps me to keep jotting down my spontaneous thoughts in them.
So, I had plenty of material available before I started to write “The Overlife, A Tale Of Schizophrenia.” I decided to make the daughter character Sarah, who narrates the book, my mouthpiece for what is in my mental health diary and the three types of note-taking that grew out of it. This material is “Schizophrenia As I Live It,” my podcast title.
What I did not have written down before the idea of writing the book was the material for the mother character, Jodie, who also lives with schizophrenia. However, my mother lived with this brain disorder, so I tapped my memory to give an impression of what it was like to be her caregiver over many years. Her experience was different from mine. For example, she never accepted that she was mentally ill.
When I began writing about Jodie, I used the above three types of note-taking, just as I had for Sarah.
However, I wanted to do more than write about schizophrenia. Like everyone living with a mental illness, my characters, Jodie and Sarah, are not defined by their diagnosis. I decided to build a human-interest fiction novel around these genuine experiences to bring that out. The fiction genre gave me a great deal of flexibility in constructing the human interest part of the novel. It also meant that certain people in my life and my mother’s could be left out of the book. Some were irrelevant, and others were not so happy about me writing about my mental illness.
Then, there was the decision to publish. That is the most courageous step!