P.J. Murphy's Writer Site

I finished my second novel, Dead Letters, after 15 years during a week in 2022 spent in isolation due to Covid. I’m writing this blog whilst suffering the effects of Covid for the third time. Is getting ill good for writing? Read on to find out the answer to the question on everyone’s mind!

I’ve been writing novels since I was a child (not all of them published, you’ll be pleased to hear!), and as a teenager I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. I remember being marked by watching a TV slot of another teenager with ME, talking about how she felt at her most creative during the worst stages of her illness, but she didn’t have the mental power to turn that into something productive. That’s exactly how I felt at the time, and it points to a couple of factors.

The most obvious is that a lot depends on how ill you are. If you’re recovering from a car accident and all your limbs are in plaster, this is not normally conducive to writing great literature. But even beyond that rather extreme example, one of the most annoying things I find about being ill is that it doesn’t just affect you physically, but mentally, too. When I’m down with the flu or a bad cold, it’s often the most I can manage to watch TV – and sometimes even that is a challenge. I’m not finding it easy to string words together to write this post, so please go easy on its occasional incoherence!

The second factor is time. One of the upsides of being unwell is that it gives you an excuse to do things you wouldn’t normally have time to do (or more often do nothing – see above). If you can strike the right level of unwellness, it can give you a window to get some writing done, which normally you have to squeeze between all the time and energy-sapping essentials of everyday life.

During my second bout of Covid, I achieved just that: I was able to push through the final chapters of a novel I had written and rewritten for well over a decade. Will I do the same this week? Well, sadly, deciding on your level of unwellness is not often up to you. Although I’m on the final stretch of writing the first draft of Beach of Spies, I have to report, sadly, that this bout of Covid is quite fierce and it’s more likely to delay completion than hasten it.

There are other factors to consider, of course, like the fact that, as a result of being unwell, I’m missing this weekend’s Geneva Writers Group biannual conference. It’s a big’un, with people travelling internationally to attend. Oh well, maybe in another two years… Oh, and I am racking up serious IOU points with my wife, who’s left alone to not only manage two kids but also take care of me.

So, on balance, if you want to get a writing project finished and not drive your partner into the ground, my advice would be to avoid getting ill.

Glad we’ve put that one to bed!