When Writers Get Depressed: An Interview with Eric Maisel about Creating Meaning with Your Writing

by Alissa Lukara

Many writers write to find and create meaning in life experiences and world events — for themselves and for their readers. One of my favorite quotes about this is from Joan Didion, who said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

But what happens when you doubt the meaning of your creative efforts? According to Eric Maisel, Ph.D., creativity coach and expert, you can feel depressed. A while back, I interviewed Eric about his book, The Van Gogh Blues: A Creative Person’s Path Through Depression, as part of his virtual book tour, and share a portion of that interview here.

Alissa Lukara: What is The Van Gogh Blues about?

Eric Maisel: For more than 25 years I’ve been looking at the realities of the creative life and the make-up of the creative person in books like Fearless Creating, Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within. A certain theme began to emerge: that creative people are people who stand in relation to life in a certain way—they see themselves as active meaning-makers rather than as passive folks with no stake in the world and no inner potential to realize. This orientation makes meaning a certain kind of problem for them—if, in their own estimation, they aren’t making sufficient meaning, they get down. I began to see that this “simple” dynamic helped explain why so many creative people—I would say all of us at one time or another time—get the blues.

To say this more crisply, it seemed to me that the depression that we see in creative people was best conceptualized as existential depression, rather than as biological, psychological, or social depression. This meant that the treatment had to be existential in nature. You could medicate a depressed artist but you probably weren’t really getting at what was bothering him, namely that the meaning had leaked out of his life and that, as a result, he was just going through the motions, paralyzed by his meaning crisis.

Alissa: Are you saying that whenever a creative person is depressed, it’s existential depression? Or might that person be depressed in some other way?

Eric: When the depression won’t go away, or if it comes back regularly, you owe it to yourself to get a medical work-up, because the cause might be biological and antidepressants might prove valuable. You also owe it to yourself to do some psychological work, as there may be psychological issues at play. But you ALSO owe it to yourself to explore whether the depression might be existential in nature and to see if your “treatment plan” should revolve around some key existential actions, like reaffirming that your efforts matter and reinvesting meaning in your art and your life.

Alissa: In addition to telling yourself your creations matter, what else helps?

Eric: I think it is a great help just to have a “vocabulary of meaning” and to have language to use so that you know what is going on in your life. If you can’t accurately name a thing, it is very hard to think about that thing. That’s why I present a whole vocabulary of meaning in The Van Gogh Blues and introduce ideas and phrases like “meaning effort,” “meaning drain,” “meaning container,” and many others. When we get a rejection letter, we want to be able to say, “Oh, this is a meaning threat to my life as a novelist” and instantly reinvest meaning in our decision to write novels, because if we don’t think that way and speak that way, it is terribly easy to let that rejection letter precipitate a meaning crisis and get us seriously blue. Get in the habit of remembering that we and we alone are in charge of keeping meaning afloat—no one else will do that for us.

Alissa: Could you explain the importance of creating a life plan sentence/statement?

Eric: If you agree to commit to active meaning-making, you need to know where to make your meaning investments, both in the short-term sense of knowing what to do with the next hour and in the long-term sense of knowing which novel you are writing or which career you’re pursuing. Having a life purpose statement or life plan statement in place helps you make the right “meaning decision” about where to spend your capital and how to realize your potential.

Alissa: Are you saying that when creative people connect to their mission or purpose, to the value of their work, and their own value as creative people in the culture, they will be stronger in their work and in their lives?

Eric: Yes. You must nominate yourself as the meaning-maker in your own life and fashion a central connection with yourself. Having some ideas about purpose is not the same as standing in relationship to yourself in such a way that you turn your ideas about purpose into concrete actions. Self-connection—understanding that you are your own advocate, taskmaster, coach, best friend, and sole arbiter of meaning and that no one else can or will serve those functions for you—is crucial.

Alissa: You write about the difference between busyness and action. Could you give my readers a sample of the self-talk writers need as they step into action?

Eric: The first step is to completely stop—not to slow down but to completely stop. Learning how to do this makes all the difference in a creative person’s life. The self-talk is exactly “I am completely stopping,” followed by the idea that you intend to calmly create without worrying about outcomes—that you are just intending to be present and to do your work. If a doubt or a worry intrudes, you dispute it by saying “I’m not interested in that doubt” or “I reject that worry,” return yourself to deep silence, and continue “just working.”

Alissa: I mentioned The Van Gogh Blues to the fiction writer’s group I’m part of and found tremendous resonance with the topic—a kind of collective sigh of recognition. Here are two questions two of the novelists asked me to pass on to you: “I like the idea of stopping and using self-talk, but wonder what is the process you recommend to get to the place where the self-talk will work? You say we owe it to ourselves to explore whether depression is existential. How do we go into this exploration? Doe you recommend sitting with each of the deeper feelings in the depression to discover meaning or is it a more surface pushing away of the feelings to exchange depression for meaning. Can you expand more on the concept of what questions can an artist ask when the blues descend.”

Eric: The short answer is that what is first required is the paradigm shift to the idea the meaning does not exist until we make it and the follow-up ideas that we must get very good at identifying how and where to make meaning investments, what to do to shore up meaning leaks, and how to grow a personal vocabulary of meaning so that we can talk to ourselves sensibly about our own meaning issues. Once all of this is in place, then we can measure events more quickly and easily as to their meaning quotient and decide, even instantly, that what we are experiencing is, for example, a blue period resulting from too long a winter or from a meaning crisis. As we learn to make these distinctions, then we also begin to learn what we need to do in response: find some sun and some warmth, in the first case, and passionately make a meaning investment or reinvestment, in the second.

Alissa: Here’s the second question: ”I would love to hear more about you thoughts about authors receiving a rejection letter (or deep editing of their novel), and the need to instantly reinvest meaning in our choice to write… that if we don’t hold that orientation, it is easy to slip into an existential blues. In essence, how do you get back on the horse?”

Eric: First, this isn’t necessary each and every time, since (for no reason we can name) some rejection letters and deep edits don’t bother us. That is a blessing—not every negative event precipitates a meaning crisis! But many do. For these, we need to do all of the following: remind ourselves that our efforts matter and that there is nothing to be gained by giving up our creative life; look our current project in the eye and accept the bite of reality—if the project needs a ton of work, we get ready to lift two thousand pounds; avoid our favorite meaning substitutes, like Scotch or sloth, even if to do that requires a formal recovery program; fall back in love with our work by saying, out loud if you dare, “I love you, work!” (and even if you hate it at that moment); and making sure to show up each day without attachment to outcomes—the daily showing up will take care of a lots of crises.

Alissa: Many of the groups and individuals I work with as a writing coach and workshop facilitator have had their creative voices silenced or marginalized by past abuse, denigration of their creativity, illness or other challenges. Even though they doubt their ability to tell their stories or the value of their personal stories or creations, they are still called to write and express them. I love what you say in The Van Gogh Blues about combating and soothing fear, the sorrow of unrealized dreams, envy, having been shamed and more by telling yourself, “I am the beauty in life” and by rushing to yourself with kindness and compassion when facing potential meaning crisis. Would you comment more on how this kind of self support can help heal self doubt and other obstacles to creating and finding meaning in one’s creations?

Eric: The harm done to us affects our basic healthy narcissism and our ability to stand behind the idea that we matter and that our efforts matter. It then becomes our responsibility to be our own best friend, advocate, and existential advisor and remind ourselves constantly that we have worth and value and that the things we long to do, like write or paint beautifully, are permissible and available. Since that harm keeps us off balance, we have to do the work of maintaining our balance each and every day, most sensibly by instituting a creativity practice: one or two sacred hours, preferably first thing each morning, when we attend to our creative needs and make some meaning. There are no curative pills or magic bullets, only the love and attention that we ourselves provide.

Alissa: You write that “most creators feel miserable if few or none of their creative efforts succeed,” but that people who choose the risky path of creating have a responsibility to feel successful no matter how much the “outer world” notices or visibly values their work. I love the phrase you use that “success is not a measure, but a feeling.” Would you comment on how writers can find meaning and feel successful even if year after year, creative project after creative project, the world does not appear to take much notice or support their creative accomplishments?

Eric: Actually, I don’t think they can. Ultimately, we do need worldly success. But that success may be a long time in coming, even decades, and so for all those decades we have to measure success in ways that fit our situation, celebrating the fact that we are showing up and writing, calling it a success when we finish a page, a chapter, and especially a whole book, feeling pride and a sense of accomplishment when we honorably revise the book as many times as the book requires, and making sure to feel the clear glow of success from persevering, from writing book one, writing book two, and then writing book three, from fathoming and dealing with the marketplace, and so on. These are all successes, which, however, must ultimately be buttressed by acquiring an audience and feeling THAT sort of success.

Alissa: You mention that intimacy and personal relationships are as important to alleviating depression as are individual accomplishments. What is the link between the two and are they forged in similar ways?

Eric: It is important that we create and it is also important that we relate. Many artists have discovered that even though their creating feels supremely meaningful to them, creating alone does not alleviate depression. If it did, we would predict that productive and prolific creators would be spared depression, but we know that they have not been spared. More than creating is needed to fend off depression, because we have other meaning needs as well as the need to actualize our potential via creating. We also have the meaning need for human warmth, love, and intimacy: we find loving meaningful. Therefore we work on treating our existential depression in at least these two ways: by reminding ourselves that our creating matters and that therefore we must actively create; and by reminding ourselves that our relationships also matters, and that therefore we must actively relate.

For more information about Eric Maisel, you can subscribe to his two podcast shows, The Joy of Living Creatively and Your Purpose-Centered Life, both on the Personal Life Media Network. You can find a show list for The Joy of Living Creatively here and one for Your Purpose-Centered Life here. Read more Eric’s work and about The Van Gogh Blues and other books for writers, including, A Writer’s Space, in which he looks at many existential issues in the lives of writers at his website.