As I write this, I’m at roughly 4500 feet elevation. (The nearest airport is surveyed at 4390; I know the friends I’m visiting are higher than that.) For most human beings, this wouldn’t be a problem, but my lungs are not playing well with the reduction in atmospheric pressure. The human body is wonderful at compensating, though: when the blood/oxygen exchange interface isn’t as effective, the body’s response is to run more blood across the interface faster, at a higher pressure. After all, if a given unit of blood picks up less oxygen, running more blood through will up the total amount of oxygen picked up.
Which translates to me sitting in a chair with a pulse of 92 (about 20 beats per minute above normal), and when walking, that quickly accelerates to compensate for the oxygen usage by the muscles to 138 beats per minutes. I can do all the normal things. I just get really tired really quickly, because I’m already working harder just to exist. Since I’m up here for the hugs, and catching up with friends, it’s all right. The most strenuous thing I’m likely to do is go shooting in the back 40, then walk down the streets of a nearby town to do a little shopping, followed by a lengthy spell sitting in the shade and petting the friendliest barn cats.
Since coffee accelerates my (already accelerated) heart rate, it’s actually making things slightly more tiring instead of all better. And that’s before we even start discussing the Broken Brown Sadness Water that is this hotel’s coffee. The place is full of construction workers, folks headed to or from the oil rigs, and an ambulance crew! How can their coffee be this weak?
Still, I’m trying to write. I have some characters, I have a setting, I have a conflict… I have very little brain. If I open a new document, my brain can’t handle coming up with a whole chapter from scratch, and the blinking cursor defeats me. So I’m doing it slower and more manually.
I pull out the spiral-bound notebook, and start noting what I need to happen in the next chapter. Then, as I come up with it, I write in some back and forth bits in the dialog, and a little scene description, or another plot thread that needs to intersect…
It comes in brief snatches, so I just keep layering it in, until it’s a chapter’s worth of content that I can then transcribe. This may take several hours, around everything else, instead of one session. That’s okay, because I get there in the end.
Once I think it’s finished, I let it sit for a while, come back and read it as a whole, edit, and then I ask an alpha reader to double-check if I have a chapter or a cabbage (if it hangs together and makes sense, engages her, and moves the story forward.)
Because of this, my chapters written here are likely to be shorter, but otherwise hopefully unaffected.
How do you compensate when your brain can’t do a full chapter at a time?
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Writing When Stupid”
You’ve actually described a short version of what I was doing during chemo (and for some time after). I would fabulate scenes scattered through more than one upcoming book of the current series-in-progress, attached to a sketchy and provisional overall plot — bits of dialogues, background pressures/issues/developments, etc. I have a pile of 5″x8″ notes in individual clipped bundles by book (including mods to the 1st two series books which are “finished” but not yet released).
It’s an inefficient process, but in times of limited energy it’s a helluvalot better than nothing. And, most importantly, it gives my brain something useful to do ruminating on story developments when I haven’t got the mindset to sit down and render the ingredients into finished & organized text — sort of like the world’s most indulgent scattered outline-with-exemplars.
I have similar problems with colds. My brains don’t work well for a while after I’ve been running a fever.
I work on short projects then, because I don’t want to mess up the Novel In Progress by forgetting that a secondary character *exists*, much less has a role in this scene.
I’m still rebooting my brain after a case of the crud. It takes me a few weeks to get all my lental sharpness back after running a fever.
So I’m working on a short story. It keeps my brain from messing up the Novel In Progress while i can’t remember who all the characters are. 🤪
Snippets, or I transcribe things from my hand-written notes into the computer. Those are almost all I can do when I’m sick, exhausted, or both.
Sickness usually turns into an excuse for me to rant and express opinions in on wordpres.
I primarily write non-fiction. That means I have sidebars, original artwork and maps and interior photographs to juggle. This in addition to the book text. If I am writing a book with 35,000 words of text I have another 20-25K worth of words of instructions to write.
When I cannot think straight I skip to stuff that doesn’t take much concentration, but needs to be done to finish the book. Things like hunting up photos to include or writing photo captions. I will also write stuff the public does not see – map instructions or artists’ instruction for the plates that will be commissioned for the book, and done by others.
I don’t know how much use that is to someone writing fiction, though.