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Do you have to be "unbalanced" to be a writer?
Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 8:41 pm
by poettess
I've enjoyed writing stories and poetry most of my conscious life and it has occurred to me that the only thing that COMPELS me to write is a moment in which I feel so much emotion that I can't deal with it. Whether I am overwhelmingly happy or in complete dispair, its when I'm left or right of center that I feel inspired. Does anyone feel capable of writing when they are just in normal life mode? Do you think most writers have wild and severe mood swings, are overly sensitive or dramatic? ..... or is it just me....
Re: Do you have to be "unbalanced" to be a writer?
Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 11:05 am
by Randy Kadish
IMHO, having wild mood swings in not helpful for writers. Few writers I know of were able to write when they were seriously depressed. If a person feels hopeless they don't see solutions, so why write? (Besides, how many writers have destroyed themselves with drugs and alcohol?) If a person is feeling great, on the other hand, why question the way things are, why look for insight and answers to human existence?
I'll put it this way: Writers produce important works when they are in touch with reality - so their vision is based in truth - but cannot make peace with it. (I'm reading Shakepeare's sonnets and he certainly wasn't at peace.)
Randy
Re: Do you have to be "unbalanced" to be a writer?
Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 3:24 pm
by poettess
Perhaps... I think of that Garbage song "I'm only happy when it rains" when I think of some of my favorite writers. I am sure there are some writers out there who simply write and their inspiration comes from some other wellspring than dissatisfaction or byronesque love. I would love to hear what some of those other inspirations might be. The fact that it is difficult to actually write a novel when you are depressed could be the reason I haven't written one yet, but I have it half written in my mind already. What are your thoughts?
Re: Do you have to be "unbalanced" to be a writer?
Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 4:41 pm
by geo
poettess wrote:I've enjoyed writing stories and poetry most of my conscious life and it has occurred to me that the only thing that COMPELS me to write is a moment in which I feel so much emotion that I can't deal with it. Whether I am overwhelmingly happy or in complete dispair, its when I'm left or right of center that I feel inspired. Does anyone feel capable of writing when they are just in normal life mode? Do you think most writers have wild and severe mood swings, are overly sensitive or dramatic? ..... or is it just me....
I think writing is therapy for many writers, so that the writing process would actually help them to stay balanced. I know that Vonnegut said something to this effect. There's a persistent myth that says something along the lines that great writers are all alcoholics, which goes along with the title of this thread. Hemingway, who was an alcoholic, is often cited as an example. But I would say Hemingway was a great writer
despite his drinking.
Re: Do you have to be "unbalanced" to be a writer?
Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 5:12 pm
by geo
Interesting article!
http://www.unhooked.com/sep/writers.htm
An excerpt:
The prototype in American letters of the alcoholic writer as tragic hero is Ernest Hemingway. The newest biography of Hemingway by Kenneth Lynn deals very forthrightly with his drinking. Hemingway had the same capacity for alcohol that his characters did, and in The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley drank three martinis apiece before lunch, which was accompanied by five or six bottles of red wine.
In 1939, Hemingway was ordered to cut down on his drinking. He tried to hold himself to three Scotches before dinner but he couldn't do it and, in 1940, he began breakfasting on tea and gin and swigging absinthe, whiskey, vodka and wine at various times during the day. He even let his boys drink hard liquor when one of them was only 10.
His alcoholism brought on hypertension, kidney and liver diseases, edema of the ankles, high blood urea, mild diabetes mellitus and possibly hemochromatosis, recurrent muscle cramps, chronic sleeplessness and sexual impotence. He shot himself to death at age 62.
William Faulkner, who won the Nobel prize in literature in 1950, was hospitalized innumerable times for alcoholism. Then there were Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker, Robert Lowell, Eugene O'Neill, John O'Hara, O. Henry, Conrad Aiken, John Berryman, Edmund Wilson--all acclaimed writers in the 1930s. All had trouble with alcohol.
Sometimes it seems that no American writers escaped the bottle.
Re: Do you have to be "unbalanced" to be a writer?
Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 5:29 pm
by poettess
Yes... so perhaps the world is too much with writers and they write because they can't handle the truth so to speak... but then there are lots of "fluff" writers so it can't be ALL of them.
Thanks for your inisight
Re: Do you have to be "unbalanced" to be a writer?
Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2010 1:47 pm
by Randy Kadish
The thing I don't get about Hemmingway - yes, he's a great craftsman - is that I don't feel he ever worked through his pain, and therefore never showed us a way to come to terms with the pain of human existence. IMHO, he didn't have a unique way of seeing the world and all the craziness in it.
What I want from a writer is to be enlightened, to be encouraged that life is worth living.
Randy
Re: Do you have to be "unbalanced" to be a writer?
Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2010 6:41 pm
by poettess
So what you are saying is that a good writer is not only unbalanced but idealistic...morose yet still yearning for things to work out in the end. I admire those unbalanced writers who can uncover the ugly truth in life... like Gaiman... or even George RR Martin.... like they are seeing things through a lens of truth instead of idealism. We have a tendancy in western society to focus on the climactic tale of triumph, but we seldom live these kinds of lives. Is ignorance bliss? Escape fiction sells...
Re: Do you have to be "unbalanced" to be a writer?
Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2010 12:29 pm
by weaver
I think Hemmingway was self-medicating. He was off-balanced like a lot of great writers. I see Vonnegut mentioned and he suffered terribly.
Virginia Woolf, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Viv Eliot, and if my brain were working better I'd be remembering more. They all had mood swings. Louisa May Alcott said she went into a "vortex" where she wrote for two weeks at a time without sleep and drinking only tea.
There was a psyc study done on writers and bipolar. There is a higher incidence of bipolar among writers then in the general population.
So, guess it would be my advice to write when the highs strike. Would be interested to see what you write.
Re: Do you have to be "unbalanced" to be a writer?
Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2010 4:52 pm
by weaver
On sevcond thought, Don't write on the highs. Think of your physical health.
There are medications out there to even out the highs and lows and then you can write without the grief of either