I’ve been in a funk lately.

A combination of things have been wearing on me. Financial issues. Big decisions. Discouragement in just about every area, from mothering to marriage to writing to my spiritual life. My mother is in the care of hospice, hundreds of miles from my home. Nothing earth shattering. Just life. Or mid-life, as the case may be.

Not surprisingly, I process feelings through writing. Typically with a pen and a lined journal, in cursive. The journals stashed in our attic are teeming with emotions. Most of the near-daily entries spanning ages 12 through 26 will meet a fiery fate at some point in the future.

I let the journaling habit slide for years, as if the bliss of marriage would negate my need to work through my disappointments, anger, fear, or joy with a ball point pen.

Then, when the rosy glow of newlywed life wore off, as it inevitably does, I resumed writing in fits and starts over the last decade or so as the urge struck me. The result is a rather unbalanced look at my life from the inside, chronicling only my most extreme highs and lows and leaving wordless the even keel that marks most of my days.

There is a prayer journal, vacation journals, a Christmas journal, and a weight loss journal (yeah, that one is mostly blank). I’ve only glanced at some of my earliest journals, and the content makes me cringe, mostly due to its immaturity.

While I scribbled in journals, I wrote other things. Articles for my high school newspaper, my college newspaper, and then in a variety of formats as part of my jobs:  ad copy, news, newsletters, website content, newspaper columns, magazine articles, position papers, and, more recently, blog posts. Upon re-read, none of them make me self-conscious despite evidence of inexperience or discussion of personal topics including miscarriage, marriage, sin, and sexuality.

Fiction, on the other hand . . .

I’ve been listening to chapters of two of my novels as narrators/producers share their completed work with me prior to the books’ availability in audiobook format.

Both are talented narrators, who bring life to the characters and the plot in unexpected ways – because they bring themselves to my stories, as every reader does. I’m awestruck at the way they bring out humor, grief, or nervousness in characters that were born in my imagination.

And, I think that’s what’s so amazing about fiction.

Readers bring themselves to the table, so to speak.

I bring myself – my hopefully older, wiser, and more skilled self – to the table when I re-read or re-listen to my work. Sometimes I marvel at a turn of phrase. Sometimes I cringe. But I never walk away unaffected as I do from any nonfiction I’ve written.

Fiction is where my insecurities still run amok. I hear this is par for the fiction author’s course. And while I hope that, say, ten books in, I’ll no longer be riddled by the fear of je ne sais quoi – failure? ridicule? – it may be endemic to the author’s life regardless of the slow but steady thickening of skin.

My Proven Remedy for a Funk - Fiction is where my insecurities still run amok. Share on X

Because fiction is personal, both to the writer and to the reader. Little bits of the author’s heart and soul bleed into the manuscript, maybe not in a particular character or a particular plot, but in subtler ways. A persistent flaw woven into a theme. A pain so deep it echoes in a character’s backstory. A memory so vivid it writes itself.

The story draws from the author’s lifeblood as a needle draws a sample of real blood.

There’s a certain “magic” in novel writing, a point at which, at least in my experience, things click. A theme resonates across a story arc, a symbol reverberates through the plot progression. All of it unplanned. I attribute the so-called magic to the work of my subconscious and hope that just a little, if I’ve been properly disposed, comes from a deeper well, from the inspiration that breathes life into every creative endeavor. From God.

It’s that real and raw substance to which we, as readers, are drawn, bringing with us all of our baggage. Our families of origin, our loves and likes, our maybe narrow views of the world, our prejudices, and our pet peeves.

During this month’s Sabbath Rest Book Talk, Rebecca Willen wondered at how from squiggles on a page, we enter into entire worlds and fantastical experiences.

A primitive mind meld of sorts. It’s nothing short of miraculous.

I still work out my emotions with pen in a lined journal. It’s cheap and effective therapy. But I contemplate the deeper stuff at a level just below the surface, letting it spill onto a computer screen and, eventually, a printed page.

And so, despite the ever-present threat of ridicule, or exposing my folly or foolishness to the world, I haven’t yet tired of writing fiction. Nor reading it.

It’s a proven way to rise above the funk.

What’s your go-to way to overcome a funk? Writing, art, exercise, or something else?

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