Do you have to be a drug addict or mentally diseased to write great Veeky Forums?

Why are so many great authors either suicidal or drug addicts / both?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers_who_committed_suicide
amazon.com/Dedalus-Book-Literary-Suicides-Letters/dp/1903517664
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Openness_to_experience
psychologytoday.com/blog/ending-addiction-good/201503/is-there-link-between-intelligence-and-mental-illness
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Yes, a lot of good authors had a hard life because of their environment or/and because of their mental illness, both things can lead to drug addictions; but, at some point in their lifes, they found literature, and they put all their time and effort into it, and they wrote in a crude, and excellent narrative. The majority of todays authors suck because now a lot of people have a good life, and they don´t put all their effort in their "writing" (John Green, Stephanie Meyer, and the list goes on); of course, there are exceptions, and I really congratulate those exceptions (which are few, but those had the good old fashioned authors as their role models, which is great)

No, writing and art are just professions where you can still be productive with such problems.

Doesn't hurt, being completely sane and straight edge makes you terribly conventional.

Writing is also an arena in which being a suicidal mentally diseased drug addict is really not as much as a hindrance as it would be in other fields.

As a schizoaffective with fairly average intelligence I have to say no. I am a shit writer, and I know a good deal of other mentally ill people (autists, bipolar, schizophrenics, etc) and drug addicts who have average or below average intelligence. In fact I think that the whole idea behind the "mentally deranged genius" to be nothing more than a goddamn movie trope for people who dont understand the first thing about cognition. But what about people like Slyvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Virginia Woolf? These people are outliers

because having to think for a living is a huge amount of pressure and work.

care to give some examples of those "exceptions"?

I forgot to add a quote from Ernest Hemingway in Garden of Eden (a pretty decent novel, completely underrated) "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I've ever known". This is bullshit, bullshit. There are millions of dumb Americans who are literally depressed as fuck

This a thousand times this. Great art comes from a place of pain. Its a trite saying but its the truth

I think you forgot your logic there, that has nothing to do with the proposition that happiness is rare in intelligent people.

What are you suggesting that intelligent people are more prone depression or mental illness. If so cite something that correlates with that hypothesis.

Not at all.

I'd like to give a snap answer, but I think the correlation exists for reasons that require much more rumination. Depression, suicidal ideation, addiction...these are all things that are common in general. Ultimately, I don't think these things accurately encapsulate the lives of most writers. Instead, they represent periods of nadir. And it is the process of reaching out of these lows toward the summit that builds the character of good writers, even if they fall down again.

Sure; Sofia Coppola

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers_who_committed_suicide

explain why this list is so goddamn long? Seriously I am not memeing I want an honest answer

The list seems long. But take the number of writers on that list out of the list of writers who have ever lived and it's statistically fairly small. Also, many of the writers are not well known.

I did not know that Hart Crane killed himself, though. I feel kind of stupid for that.

It seems too easy to attribute the correlation to a sensitivity that writers possess, but sometimes the simplest answer is the most accurate. I don't know for sure. Seems like it requires more thought, like I said.

By the way, this conversation reminds me of a Dedalus book I always wanted to buy:

amazon.com/Dedalus-Book-Literary-Suicides-Letters/dp/1903517664

I also wonder if the writer suicide rate goes up after industrialization (accounting for writer inflation, I guess, since obviously there were many more writers after industrialization).

most of those lists are literary who's

I just learned today that Walter Benjamin killed himself. Also so did John Kennedy Toole. It almost makes me want to finish A confederacy of dunces.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Openness_to_experience

Basically, if you're high in openness you have trouble keeping boundaries on things. This applies metaphysically as well as literally. A person low in openness stubs their toe and goes "well that sucks." A person high in openness stubs their toe and says "today will be a bad day."

This is just an example, but it illustrates that when something bad happens they don't keep boundaries on it -- it spreads into other aspects of life. So with their stubbed toe they miss a bus, so it's a really bad day, and then they get dumped by their partner and why live?

It seems to me you've reversed the logic.
You've basically said:
>shitty environment, shitty life, very bad luck ---> author becomes a literary genius
Well, I'm pretty sure it's the opposite. At least, in most cases it's the opposite.
>author is a literary genius ---> shitty environment, shitty life, lots of delusions

this seems like a slipper slope argument

Why not reading them and seeing it for yourself? ;)

Yes, that's pretty much what happens if those high in openness aren't careful to keep things in perspective. The higher they are, the harder it is.

This.
I suggest you inject exactly two (2) marijuanas just before you write. The difference will be astounding

No. You don't HAVE to be, although there may have been plenty of great writers who were afflicted by these things that could have influenced their work.

All the bad experiences from great authors are part of what motivated them to write, they needed to get their stress out, and they did it via reading and writing literature; nobody is born as a "literary genious"

It's more of an environmental thing. It's not just great writers. It's anybody working in a creative field. That includes artists, musicians, even graduate students. There was a study done at Berkeley showing that 64% of humanities grad students were clinically depressed. Creative types have nothing to structure their days. If they want to stay up all night drinking and doing drugs all the time, they can because they don't have to get up early to go to work the next day. Writers spend a lot of their time alone thinking, which is lonely. It's also stressful because you can never leave your work behind at the office. This kind of environment is conducive to depression and addiction formation. This issue is compounded by the fact that you are often surrounded by people with similar vices.

People will turn their weaknesses into virtues. I'm depressed and that sucks, so in order to feel better about myself I'll go ahead and claim that the depression makes me a better artist. Didn't van Gogh say something about how he did his best work while he was stable and content, whereas he hated everything he painted during his depressive episodes?
I know plenty of people who deal with mental illness who don't create anything at all, they maybe post to Instagram about once a week and that's as far as their creative expression goes; on the other hand, the most productive artists out there might be happy as can be, they haven't experienced mental illness at all and all the inspiration from their work comes from their joie de vivre, their family, their religion, whatever, you just don't hear about those people all that often. Who's to say what's "great" art anyway? Jojo Moyes and those guys who illustrate Watchtower pamphlets aren't my definition of genius either, but they're still more or less good at their craft. They're still artists.
When you're really depressed, when your drug addiction spirals way out of control, you literally cannot write. You can reflect on what that felt like after you've gotten better, but all things considered, anyone who's coherent, energetic, mentally capable enough to write isn't actively experiencing madness.
I think it's a cultural thing and absolutely nothing more. It's about how artists are traditionally considered outcasts. And like all outcasts, they've made a virtue of that, and learned to like that role. The attitude society has in regards to unusually creative people is what gets you both great philosophers and dweebs who play around with knockoff katanas in their mothers' basements, desperately trying to convince themselves that they never wanted to fit in in the first place and they're totally cool with being unpopular.
Most writers, artists, thinkers are idiots just like most people are idiots in general. 90% of everything sucks, no matter how you group it together or how you distinguish it from whatever rest there is. Mentally ill people are largely dull and boring because all people are largely dull and boring. When a bunch of personality traits and/or environmental factors come together to form a once-in-a-generation genius, that's sheer dumb luck.

you have loose thoughts

I remember smoking pot with a Mexican gang banger in High School. I was into emo music and looked the part but we still hung out from time to time for whatever reason. One time dude started crying about hating himself and wanting to die. He wasn't a smart dude, at least not with math, science or reading. Could roll a joint though. Life is hard no matter how smart or stupid you are. Writers tend to express sadness better than most poor guys.

I literally cannot write without meth

First of all, I never said authors are born literary geniuses. Second, you're wrong because bad experiences do not happen by coincidence but because you choose a certain lifestyle, i.e. you choose to devote yourself to literature.

>he didn't even ask me why I said that
Fuck off pathetic kid.

>First of all, I never said authors are born literary geniuses.

Let me quote your pastb reply:
>Well, I'm pretty sure it's the opposite. At least, in most cases it's the opposite.
>author is a literary genius ---> shitty environment, shitty life, lots of delusions


You started with "author is a literary genious", but how? Easy, thanks to all the steps that I established and that you, for some reason, inverted

>Second, you're wrong because bad experiences do not happen by coincidence but because you choose a certain lifestyle, i.e. you choose to devote yourself to literature.

Did Stephen King chosed to be struggling with money? Or did John Steinbeck chosed to be living at the Great Depression? No, so I don´t know what makes you think the opposite; all those issues made great authors refugee in literature.

>he didn't even ask me why I said that
Why would I do that? It doesn´t makes sense

>Fuck off pathetic kid.
What an irony, who typed that? Perhaps a writer wannabe, who thinks you don´t need issues to give the best of you, sorry, but that´s not true; J.K Rowling had issues when writing Harry Potter; Stephen King had issues while writing his first books; so did Bukowski, and, Poe, and Lovecraft, and Carroll, and the list goes on.

Let us take Shostakovitch as an example. He had a hard life. This is something few would deny but he wrote music before his life was hard. Either way he would have been a skilled and recognized composer of the 20th century. It just so happens that his life turned to shit. No doubt his experiences changed his music but it can't be argued that his genius is merely a response to his circumstances.

>Didn't van Gogh say something about how he did his best work while he was stable and content, whereas he hated everything he painted during his depressive episodes?
Van Gogh hated his insane phases not so much because he didn't like what he painted during them but that he couldn't paint at all during them. The attacks were to acute to paint and the aftermath of the attacks often left him in circumstances that prevented him from painting for weeks at a time.
I think Van Gogh is a bad example though. He was a man with clear and big problems outside of his actual attacks that are obvious in him for at least ten years before he started painting. He is a main whose troubled thinking profoundly effected his art.

You must be stupid as fuck

Shostakovitch may had a decent life before, but where those bad experiences which made him put all his effort into his songs, imagine that, living a hard life and you have the chance that the thing you love the most can take you out of that hard life, of course you will try to put all your effort into it, it´s more or less: "The last chance"

Well. George Lucas hated Star Wars before it was on theathers, he thought it was going to be a gib failure, but they weren´t, he was so hard with himself that he thought that every step was not enough, the same could apply with Gogh

When you have no arguments and you have to insult; classic

It's different. I have already told you my point of view, you explicitly refused to understand it -- like a real narrow-minded neckbeard -- and came up with ridiculous names and arguments that didn't disprove my point but only reaffirm yours. When you've learned how comprehension and communication work, come back.
>inb4 "you're overshadowing the discussion and my arguments"
No, I'll talk to you when you'll stop being a pretentious one-way thinker and pathetic faggot full of himself.

What arguments? I already typed why it doesn´t have sense, and I gave examples to try to prove my point, I haven´t seen the defenses of your argument yet, and still, you keep insulting

psychologytoday.com/blog/ending-addiction-good/201503/is-there-link-between-intelligence-and-mental-illness

It seems that when you have a person considered a genius, they have an outlying and strange personality.

You don't have normal people who live a happy life, very common and acceptable, and then suddenly write a masterpeice.

You do have very talented authors though in this field. Usually in the non fiction section of your library.

As for fiction, some part of the very idea of genius is thinking of something that nobody else would. Feel free to criticize the authors I produce after you argue against my point.

Vonnegut. Nearly died in Germany, clear from his work he had gone to war. Admits that otherwise he is nothing special.

Stephen King: Saw a terrible train accident when he was a kid. Can't exactly write well, but comes up with truly scary ideas and can capture the essence of small town america.

Thomas Woolfe: Extremely vigorous and eccentric writer who could not stop writing and alienated everyone he ever loved.

Nabokov: Wrote on cards and destroyed his work. Literally wrote his book again because he thought someone would mess up the translation.

These are small examples. But in my view, the best non fiction writers are level headed, the best fiction writers are troubled. This doesn't mean poor or mentally ill.

If you can find a celebrated artist who lived a completely mundane life and was mostly happy with it, please direct me to their work.

People who want to be famous writers are like people who want to be celebrities: damaged, grew up in families where there was little mirroring/understanding from parents (so they forming narcissistic dreamworlds to escape to). To be a writer is a slightly more self-conscious and patrician desire than being a celebrity.

In regard to Shostakovitch you are assuming your premise is correct in your reasoning. Your logic is going something like
>Hard lives make for better artists
>Shostakovitch was an artist before his life was hard but it being hard made his art better because hard lives make for better artists
This doesn't prove anything. You have no way of knowing any of that stuff you are assuming about him. I could easily project whatever I want into his private thoughts and ambitions to come up with conclusion that I want.
Also
>put all his effort into his songs
>songs
>Shostakovich
REEEEEEEEEE

I have zero idea what you are getting at with George Lucas in relation to Van Gogh. The two cases as you put forward have nothing to do with each other.

>You don't have normal people who live a happy life, very common and acceptable, and then suddenly write a masterpiece.
I feel like you are stacking the deck unfairly in your favor. Of course no normal person living a common life is going to make a masterpiece because that isn't normal or common. The thousands of hours of diligent practice and intense effort to make a masterpiece in any medium is not normal. However the point in contention is not are they normal but are the creators of these works of art prone to mental illness and/or addiction.

>If you can find a celebrated artist who lived a completely mundane life and was mostly happy with it, please direct me to their work.
I'll ignore the mundane part (again because that has nothing to do with what is actually being debated and as I said before is an unfair criteria).
>Bach
>Mendelssohn
>Verdi
>Liszt
>Moore
>Hume
>Thoreau
>Goethe
>Cicero
>Leonardo Da Vinci
>Raphael
There is a random list of painters/composers/philosophers/writers off of the top of my head.