Butt in the Chair: How Disability Changed My Writing Habits
by Catherine Tavares
Editor’s note: This piece is part of an occasional series titled Writing by Other Means, in which authors share personal experiences and industry intel around different production contexts and writing tools.
It’s spring 2023. My desk is clean, my laptop on and humming along like a charm. It’s open to a brand new Scrivener file, and I have three hours free to work on my stories.
Only, I’m not in the chair writing. I’m on the floor in agonizing pain.
In the years since that day, there have been many doctors, tests, and treatments that have all led to the same disappointing diagnosis: unexplained, chronic nerve pain. On a good day, that means a hot, tingling buzz radiating from my hips on down. On a bad day, it’s like the entire lower half of my body is being scraped raw by fiery sandpaper.
That day, I could not sit, and just like that, I could not write.
A common bit of writing advice given to authors is to just “get your butt in the chair” and write. For a long time, that advice worked for me, and I built my habits around spending hours at my desk, not getting up until I met my goal. My desk was my writing haven; the mere act of sitting down triggered creativity, productivity, and joy.
But as the days of unending pain dragged into weeks and months, my haven became a horror. I dreaded being at my desk, too scared to start new projects, too hurt to finish current ones. The old way of writing, like the old me prior to my diagnosis, was dead—a terrible, unfair, and devastating fact I took the better part of a year to grieve.
My disability took away my writing haven and habits, but, oddly, it also helped me find a new path, following the cues of my journey through chronic pain treatment.
The Physical Barrier
First, there was the physical barrier I needed to overcome. At the beginning of my medical treatments, I gravitated toward identifying and managing the physical ailments contributing to my pain: damaged tissues, malfunctioning organs, and mangled muscles became targets for physical therapy, medications, even surgery.
Similarly, when it came to reworking my writing, I started with the practical solutions.
I could not sit, so I would stand. First with a haphazard stack of boxes my laptop balanced on, then later with a proper standing desk. I couldn’t stand forever, though, so I began experimenting with chairs, pillows, and positions, seeing how my pain reacted to each. Did I need firmness or cushion today? Cloth or leather? Molded or flat surfaces? My own body was not exempt from the changes. I draped myself with heating pads and ice packs, found creative uses for over-the-counter numbing creams, learned to manspread. I was playing whack-a-mole with my own pain triggers, a quick and dirty try/fail system that left little room for ambiguity, allowing the sheer quantity of what I tried to lead to quality options.
But even with the new setup, I still felt stymied. Yes, I was able to physically write again, but I never got back those long stretches of writing that my pantser-style thrived on. The interruptions were still there: moving between standing and sitting, turning on and off the heating pad, stopping for medication, always keeping one eye on my body.
I had a new physical writing space. Now I needed to rework my mental writing style.
Team Daydreamer
At the end of 2024, I enrolled in a pain clinic where I’ve been learning all about how my head, the organ of my brain, plays a role in the manifestation and experience of pain. I’m exploring neuroplasticity, meditation, neural pathways, CBT, ACT, and a thousand other acronyms that all boil down to hacking my own nervous system to work for me.
If I could hack my own brain, I figured, then I could most certainly hack my own writing process.
I did so, inspired by a mental health exercise called Internal Family Systems Therapy. I enjoyed IFST because it let me do what I do best: create characters, assign them roles, and take them on a journey together. IFST helped me through a lot of the trauma of disability, and it also made me realize just how much work I can do inside my own head—no desk or chair required.
In the wake of that breakthrough, I abandoned Team Pantser for a term I am making up just now: Team Daydreamer. When I’m in the shower, lying in bed, eating a meal, exercising, I meditate on my stories. I plan out the plots, worlds, characters, compose entire scenes word-for-word—all before I ever actually get my butt in the chair to write. And when I do finally get to my desk, with half the story work already done, I can spare the attention my body needs and have a productive session well within my pain limits.
I can finally physically and mentally write again.
Letting Go
Today, my desk is currently set to height #2 for standing. Behind me, on my chair, is a donut pillow and a heating pad. In ten minutes, I will walk away from this document and take a break so the pain can simmer back down. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Disability has taught me that healing isn’t actually about going back to how things were but rather about letting go of the old ways, trying new things, and, ultimately, leaning into creativity to make it all work. It is a lot like writing.
So, even though my butt isn’t in the chair and hasn’t been for a long time, my body and my writing can both still thrive.
Catherine Tavares is a speculative fiction author of sci-fi and fantasy and member of both SFWA and Codex. Her work has appeared on the Nebula Recommended Reading List and been featured in magazines such as Nature, Flash Point SF, Factor Four, and Haven Spec. An avid reader, she spends most of her time haunting the shelves of her local library, but she can on occasion be persuaded to try a new recipe or work on a knitting project. Read her work and learn more about her at catherinetavares.com.
