National Mental Health Awareness Month - What We Can Do as Writers

Last time I checked (and maybe it's been a while), I was human. The tricky thing about being human - that is, being a brain driving a barely-held-together bag of meat and bones - means we make mistakes. Cthulhu knows I've made a lot of them. Like that time I tried to make banana bread muffins without adding flour. Or the time I recycled a receipt, on the back of which my partner had written a bunch of measurements he needed for a home improvement project. Or the several months in which I tried to query a 168,000-word YA fantasy manuscript.

Yup. Mistakes have been made.

It's okay to talk about mistakes. Oftentimes, the only way we can improve - whether it's our attitude, our behavior, our craft, or any number of other things - is by understanding how we have failed in the past. And yet, as querying writers, it can be so hard to talk about mistakes, or about anything that's gone wrong in our querying lives recently. Sometimes, it feels as if we have to pretend as though nothing bad ever happens. Those 50 unanswered queries? Never happened. That blistering feedback from a CP? All good. Nope, nothing unpleasant to see here, folks, here's a photo of my cat.

There's this fear that we can't say anything even remotely negative on social media, Twitter especially, because an agent might see it. Not even just agents anymore - there's this fear that anyone could see a tweet, take a screenshot, and sit on it, just waiting for the right moment to cancel us. It leads to this idea that we have to be perfect online: no mention of failure, of mistakes, of problems, of how much we're struggling. Everything has to be flawless, carefully curated quiet perfection.

It doesn't have to be this way. May is National Mental Health Awareness Month. As writers, let's start to normalize the practice of admitting when we fail, or talking openly about our struggles when things get tough. Let's admit to the fact that we sent all those unanswered queries. Let's let it be okay to have to work for our successes. And as a community, let's stop condemning the truth about how hard writing can be to the silent darkness.