Do you have to be miserable to write well?

/thread

misery will simply give you something to write, but the raw materials are not the final product. you also need to give it a presentable shape.

you first need to acquire a 'language', like literature or philosophy, and then your mind will express itself, its misery in this case, in that language. the urgency of the expressive need will be proportional to the quality of the writing.

so, being mildly miserable, like nearly everyone else in todays world, wont give you much material to write. if you want to be a writer out of misery you need to be full of it. if youre not, dont bother trying.

Stop making these fucking threads you self-indulgent slobs

hide them if you dont like them you fag.

it helps immensely
unhappy people are just genuinely more curious (and I mean genuine in a literal sense, a la 'authentic), and are more open to new ideas to explain their own plight
this leads to better writing

Oh shut up, what are you, 19?

You can experience misery without being all the time miserable, and certainly without being miserable to be around.

And please don't read this as being about depression. Depression is depression. Then again there is the unfortunate tendency in all of us to go around the world feeling as if it hasn't quite given us our do, ennobling this private drama with labels like "creative struggle."

>le tortured genius maymay

hopelessly banal

that's a terrible way of simplifying things

>You can't have literature without struggle or conflict

A typically Western viewpoint. Read up on the Japanese Kishōtenketsu. Hell, Emile Zola's 'slice-of-life' ideal should also show up the wrongness of your viewpoint.

why so mad? i dont see a radical contradiction in what you say to my post. yeah you sure can experience misery from time to time. thats normal. thats what i called, maybe inaccuratley, mild misery.

but if you are to see the lives of those who produced valuable writing they were not facing this normal misery, but their lives themselves were misery. of course im not talking about that being the ONLY way to be a writer. but that is the topic of the thread.

>viewing the globe from a flat warped plot with the Atlantic in the center
typical non-STEM weeb

>but if you are to see the lives of those who produced valuable writing they were not facing this normal misery, but their lives themselves were misery.

Some were depressed, some were not, and there is no general rule. Writers, in terms of their character and personal lives, have come in all imaginable varieties, save those that exclude a propensity for writing.

I am mad (not at you, O person-on-the-internet) at the extent of the association between depression and creativity in people's minds. It's backwards wrong. Depressed writers who managed to get work out did so in spite of depression, which is generally crippling and tends to destroy motivation.

But the real danger is in people ennobling, elevating and seeking depression and misery, or feeling like incomplete persons because they lack it.

A writer may speak to anything of that which is universal to human experience, which may emerge by way of particulars (the tragedy of death, the life of romance), but which ultimately transcends them. You do not need to have any kind of biography to write, only a specific kind of intellectual life, one that hunts down metaphors, meaning and beauty wherever it can.

youre forcing too much the dissociation between 'depression' and writing or arts. it is obviously not a cause and effect thing as many people think, i agree that such a misconception is quite nonsensical, but you are simply going to the other extreme when you say that 'depressed' writers did it in spite of depression. it is not a black/white thing.

and i think that you might wanna give that last paragraph a second thought, cause even if it may make sense, a particular experience is as necessary as an 'intellectual life'. i cant really give arguments for that cause ive seen things like that too, and it was only experience itself that made realize its importance. let me quote, from memory, confucius: 'study alone is useless, experience alone is blind'.

No but.....writers are usually intelligent, weirdo introverts. Those type of people are pretty prone to depression and addiction and all that shit.

>it is not a black/white thing.

This is a stupid cliche that can be invoked anywhere someone is making a claim about anything. Do you really think I see it as exactly one way or another?

>and i think that you might wanna give that last paragraph a second thought,

I've given it a second, a third, a fourth and plenty more. It's not some instinctive garble. William Shakespeare had extraordinary insight into human life, wrote some of the greatest characters of western literature, and by what traces we may know of him, appears to have been a rather unremarkable character. He saw no wars, he was not an orphan, he didn't sail across the ocean.

On the other extreme, John Smith had about as adventurous a life as one could imagine, but his writings about the Powhatan make it clear that he had exactly 0 appreciation for the meaning of encounter.

Somewhere in the middle we have Charles Dickens, who was sent away as a youth to hard labor to help get his father out of debtors' prison, and managed to channel such experience into a vast sensitivity to the lives of poor people, a sentiment that is everywhere in his writing.

There is a relationship between experience and writing, but it's possible to be a masterful and deeply human writer, and not only a technical one, without ever leaving your home.

Nonsense, the only good writers were the happy ones, or the shitposting ones.

simple problems require simple answers :^)

Starving African children sure make the best novels.

Nice post, and I like your examples.

There are starving Africans that are happier than most.

man why are you so insecure about your personal choices, that you need to generalize them as universals or better than others? all you say tells nothing about writing or human experience but about yourself and your particular experience.

theres no argument possible cause if it works for you then great. but if you need to universalize only cause of that, well... that says a lot about how you feel about your own path.

>implying Shakespeare wasn't a pen name for Pope Clement IX

Hamlet was inspired by the death of his son, btw.

I guess you could say he was beset by the human condition, like everyone else.

I take the center to be Antarctica and thus call everything Northern.

what a chipper guy
guess not, OP

only if you write about being a beta like hemingway

his claim to fame was literally autofiction about getting cucked by latinos and jews because his dick doesn't work

I don't care about that chink shit. If you loke gooks so much why don't you fuck off to them. We live in the west, this is a western board, so of course a western view point permeates every opinion. Fucking retard gook lover nigger.

Just like your post.

They have no education so there are concepts, that might explain their emotional and psychological condition, which they do not know of. So they are basically like animals.

Dear Human On Other End:

I've made plenty of mistakes in my life, and have many reasons to feel regretful about them. I'm full of outrageous insecurities about my person in the face of the world, against the existence of talent, skill and virtue all dwarfing what I would even dare of dreaming to achieve.

Isn't that all of us? Forget all this stepping on heads, we're in the same boat.

I'm just regurgitating Harold Bloom, don't mind me.

I'm not whoever you responded to and I didn't read the thread but this post made gave me cancer

oh no!

kinda

Hey Veeky Forums. I'm starting to become more confident in myself and much more happy in general after about 3-4 years of bitter self-hatred and depression. What should I do to reverse all of this so that I can become a great writer?