Hysteria

No. Not me. Not yet, anyway.

I’ve been trying to get my November Deadlines for Writers story done this week. It’s not due until November 6th but since I’m getting ready to start NaNoWriMo on Friday, I think it’s better to not have to add these 1,200 words to the 50,000 already on the calendar. (And, the December story will be due on December 4th so I may also have to tackle that in November, or at least in December while I nurse my NaNoWriMo hangover.)

This month’s prompt is Hysteria and we get 1200 words for the short story. I started with my normal brainstorming and expanded beyond a post it not this time. I went down quite a rabbit hole of research to try and find an angle.

Did you know that the word hysteria comes from the Greek word for uterus. It used to be a diagnosis attributed to a wandering uterus that caused women to be emotional or irrational (in the eyes of men). For many years, it provided the medical system an excuse to hospitalize women for behaving in a way men didn’t think was appropriate. It was also called the widow’s disease because they felt the cause was a lack of sex.

My research also reminded me of the 1987 album by Def Leopard, Hysteria, and the song of the same name. I also got a good dose of Freud, mass hysteria, hysterically funny and histrionic personality disorder.

Nothing yet to trigger a story. So I decided to try quotes and found a few that I thought could lead to a story. Still no luck. I even broadened my perspective, thinking I could “cheat” and just have Def Leopard’s Hysteria playing in the background of a scene or even one line of dialogue with something like, “don’t get hysterical”. It would seem so easy, wouldn’t it? (I actually think that it’s harder when you can write about anything so it wasn’t much help.)

So I pulled out the Emotional Thesaurus for ideas. I thought maybe if I read descriptions of hysteria and other extreme emotions it would trigger something.

Still nothing. (But a lot of interesting rabbit holes and odd research. If randomly researching things was a job, I’d be very good at it.)

I generally just need an interesting sentence or image to come up with something to get started. It doesn’t always (or very often) end up being what I started with but I just know that I need to hear the keys clicking and it seems to spawn more words on the page.

I signed up for an online Shut up & Write! session and decided I would just start writing and see where it took me. I logged in and just started freewriting. No plan, nothing specific in mind. (In fact I often start those kinds of sessions just writing to myself.)

It was helpful because it was the first writing I’ve done in a while and it helped to remind me that I can sit down and write. I was (again) using research as procrastination and felt like I needed to know what I was going to write before I sat down. Having the scheduled session meant that I was going to sit down and type something for an hour and it was what I needed to force myself behind the keyboard.

That said, I still don’t have a story. I’m now up to three story starts that didn’t head anywhere interesting enough to continue. I still don’t quite have a plot figured out but have some more ideas. And I have another 24 hours to at least get a draft down on paper if I want to have it completed before NaNoWriMo starts. (So I best quit writing this and get back to it.)