048: On Searching for A Different Stereotype
Or, my concern that writers are trapped between choosing creativity or choosing happiness
Hi friends,
Happy Easter, Happy Pesach, and Blessed Ramadan to everyone who celebrates those holidays!
I began writing this on a plane from Dallas to Burbank (then spent the week too busy playing catch up and recovering from a cold to finish before now.) Planes are probably my favorite places to write, maybe simply because I’m finally alone with my laptop and a lack of other possible options to fill my time. The forced focus seems to do something for me, which maybe I should take as a sign that if I simply force myself into periods of time without distractions then I would be a more productive writer. Will I learn anything from this? Only time will tell.
This week marks my first week working full-time for myself again, after chickening out doing the same thing last spring. I will still be doing marketing for Go Fund Bean, but I’ll be able to focus more fully on writing and Unruly Figures, which I’m incredibly excited about. I have so much in the works that I can’t wait to share with you all!
But for now, let’s hop into this essay (a few days late).
Just in time for me to have an existential crisis, LitHub published an article about the link between creativity and sadness.
I say it caused me an existential crisis because I have spent the past few years trying to convince myself that it is possible to be a writer and be happy. So much of our media and cultural stereotypes depict writers as loners and alcoholics, wrapped up in their manuscripts and depression, squirreling away words and empty bottles. That’s a stereotype I have fallen into myself, suffering as I do from depression and coming from a long line of self-medicating alcoholics.
However, it’s not a story I want for myself. Depressed alcoholics don’t make great friends or romantic partners. Just as there’s a long history of sad writers pouring their trauma into a glass and onto a page, there’s an equally long history of writers being terrible spouses—you don’t have to look much further than J.D. Salinger or F. Scott Fitzgerald to get the gist.
In trying to reject that fate for myself, I started actively searching out examples of the opposite. I wanted to prove to myself that there is such a thing as a happy writer. I sought out proof that we don’t have to suffer for creation, that a person can be both mentally well and make great art.
It exists, of course it does. I think of Jeff Koons, who has struggled because all humans do, but for whom art is not about the struggle, who doesn’t channel constant sadness into creativity. But the larger story I’ve gotten from this search is that, I’m sad to say, sadness works. LitHub’s article explores several psychological studies that tell us why, quoted below:
Borowiecki found that the artists’ negative emotions were not only correlated with but also predictive of their creative output. And not just any negative emotions had this effect. Just as scholars of minor key music found that sadness is the only negative emotion whose musical expression uplifts us, Borowiecki found that it was also “the main negative feeling that drives creativity.”
[…]
Other studies have found that sad moods tend to sharpen our attention: They make us more focused and detail oriented; they improve our memories, correct our cognitive biases. For example, University of New South Wales psychology professor Joseph Forgas found that people are better able to recall items they’ve seen in a store on cloudy days compared to sunny ones, and that people in a bad mood (after being asked to focus on sad memories) tend to have better eyewitness memories of a car accident than those who’d been thinking of happy times.
There are many possible explanations, of course, for such findings. Perhaps it’s the sharpened attention that Forgas’s studies suggest. Or maybe emotional setbacks instill an extra degree of grit and persistence, which some people apply to their creative efforts; other studies suggest that adversity causes a tendency to withdraw to an inner world of imagination.
From “Is There an Inherent Connection Between Sadness and Art-Making?”
I experienced this myself. Some of my best writing has been done during prolonged fits of melancholy and sadness. Something about feeling sad or lonely renders me more capable of the kind of clarity and nuance that births good writing. Moreover, I often struggle to write anything at all when I’m happy and have historically been at my least productive in the periods of my life when I felt my happiest and most supported.
I didn’t (don’t) want this to be true because I didn’t (don’t) want to be depressed anymore. Sometime in my twenties, I became convinced that to write was to be depressed, at least for me, and that treating the depression would take away my creativity. But at the same time I got sick of bleeding for my work, so to speak. I started freelancing more and writing fiction less because I wanted to write but not feel like my output hinged on how deep in my own melancholy I was that day. But it wasn’t creatively fulfilling on the same level, so I started searching for another way—for a way to be happy and also be creative.
Searching desperately for happy writers for my own sanity made me finally take a step back and look at the landscape of writing and mental health as part of a larger societal shift toward accepting therapy. Obviously, no one can ever be sure of what is happening in someone else’s head, and so who am I to say whether another writer is happy or not? If all I’ve got is a famous author’s Twitter feed to analyze, the reality is that I really don’t know anything about their life. But in conversations with fellow writers, through watching what people I respect are doing, I’ve started to draw a clearer picture of the link between melancholy and the modern writer.
What I think is happening is that we’re entering a new age of writers, of what it looks like to be a writer. Because sadness and melancholy are precursors to great art but we’ve also come around to the understanding that depression doesn’t work; that there’s a point where creativity suffers because of too much sadness, too much melancholy; that substance abuse doesn’t inspire creation long-term.
I think what we loved about previous writers who did their battle with their demons on the page was that they were mostly arriving at some sort of “other side” to their problems. They were using their creativity to heal themselves and heal others even when that wasn’t explicitly “the point.” There’s a reason why this is so easy to do in novels: the classic hero’s journey is normal life → inciting incident → crossing the threshold → challenges → abyss → revelation → transformation → normal life. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this mirrors, loosely, the therapeutic journey. Healing looks a lot like normal life → inciting incident (trauma) → crossing the threshold (admitting you have something to deal with) → challenges (to healing) → abyss (wondering if you ever will) → revelation (breakthrough) → transformation (the changes you have to make to heal) → normal life.
Dealing with your trauma alone in an age where therapy doesn’t exist or is poorly executed understandably leads to self-medicating patterns, and that led prior generations of writers into other problems of addiction and abuse and general bad behavior. But people writing today, in an age where therapy is usually an effective decision, don’t have to deal with their trauma alone.
Writers are still cut from the same cloth as our artistic ancestors—there’s still a preponderance of mental health issues in the writing community. I think the difference is that more writers are embracing actual mental health treatment, instead of allowing their trauma to consume them. The stereotype of the lonely alcoholic blearily putting words on a page through the haze of a hangover is fading away to something a little more nuanced and a little less toxic. Maybe it still requires sadness, but it doesn’t require suffering.
Melancholy still sharpens our memories, sadness still distills emotions, and writing is still healing. The beauty in good writing comes from being able to look your demons in the eye and translate that pain into words, and maybe now, maybe finally, some of that grit comes from having a good support system instead of having a good supplier.
I mentioned at the top that I’ve been focusing on writing more! You can check out some of my work in ROADBOOK, a new travel magazine that is stunningly beautiful. Read my love letter to LA in their LA City Guide or check out my list of LA’s great museums and galleries.
I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat.
If you liked this and think your friends might too, feel free to forward it on. That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?
Great job on the post