Being a marginally crazy (depending on the day) person, a writer, and a person who tends to really, really enjoy the company of the other crazy persons, I am interested in the question "Do you HAVE to be crazy to be a writer, or does it just help?"
Here's a list from my master's thesis (yes, I got credit for something this inane). Of the people on the list, who are your favorites? Who would you add to this list, and why?
Excerpt follows:
" The world at large, it seems, regards self-destruction of one variety or another as endemic, and possibly necessary, to the profession of writing. Drunken escapades, madness and suicide are almost cliche, expected. An incomplete list of writers who self-destructed in one way or the other reads like a Who's Who list[1]: Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, John Berryman, Maxwell Bodenheim, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, O. Henry, Caroline Gordon, Shirley Jackson, Denis Johnson, Anna Kavan, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Robert Lowell, Malcolm Lowry, Grace Metalious, Herman Melville, Joaquin Miller, John O'Hara, Eugene O'Neill, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allen Poe, Theodore Roethke, Adela Rogers St. John, Delmore Schwartz, Anne Sexton, Jean Stafford, George Sterling, Allen Tate, Dylan Thomas, Edmund Wilson and Virginia Woolf.[2] Many more could be added.
Some scientific studies bear out the anecdotal evidence. The first long-term clinical study of this question, released in 1987 by Dr. Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa[3], found 80% of the small sample of writers (30 writers over the course of 15 years) suffered from an affective disorder at some point in their lives and 30% had alcoholism. The study reports “Most writers reported that they tended to write during these normal periods rather than during highs or lows.” "
(The thesis concludes that one can behave sanely and write well, but I won't inflict the whole thing on you. And I just gotta believe that you gotta keep some bad habits or you'll be too boring enough to put yourself to sleep.)
Footnotes:
[1] Many of the names on this list came from Ann Waldron's article in the Washington Post "Writers and Alcohol", March 14, 1989, pp. 13-15.
[2] This list is not separated by the writer's individual diagnosis, as making that distinction is sometimes difficult for even a trained psychiatrist and regardless, is outside the scope of this paper. Some authors treated depression with substance abuse, others committed suicide, others acted like common drunkards. All these writers engaged in seriously self-destructive behavior.
[3] Dr. Nancy Andreason; Creativity and Mental Illness: Prevalence Rates in Writers and Their First-Degree Relatives; American Journal of Psychiatry, October 1987, pages 1288 - 1292
Now, on to that nested short story novel I'm supposedly working on.
4 comments:
Interesting stuff about writers. Sure you want to be one? I love to write; hate to publish.
Well, I guess it all depends on your definition of crazy, eh? I know lots of people who think it's crazy to burrow in a basement for hours at a time, agonizing over imaginary characters & finding the one right word(which is partially why I don't like to talk about my writing w/ people ~ you can see it in their eyes when they start to think you're a whack-job).
This is a slight perversion of the topic at hand, but I love this Margaret Atwood quote: "Even though Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton had been setting new, high standards in self-destructiveness for female poets, and people had begun asking me not whether but when I was going to commit suicide (the only authentic woman poet is a dead woman poet?), I was wondering whether it was really all that necessary for a woman writer to be doomed, any more than it was necessary for a male writer to be a drunk."
Nope, I'm not sure I want to be a writer. I think I have to be, having no other skills and being obsessed. Yup, you can make the argument that anyone who would spend so much time indoors agonizing over tenses and such, for nothing, must be nuts. Thanks for the Atwood quote, T. She rocks. And Grandpa, the list is far too Amero-centric (is that a word?). Give me the name of some good Aussie writers, crazy or not. I don't get out much (seriously) and need to expand my reading list.
That's a question I've asked myself, too, Norma. And I think it's that I must be one. How come you hate to publish? Is it the rejection process that comes inevitably befor publication and seems to grind inexorably on?
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