There is perhaps no archetype more persistent throughout the history of art and literature than that of the tortured artist. From the tragically real cases (like Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace), to self-conscious poseurs (who shall remain nameless), angst-filled writers in both fiction and real life are an enduring staple in culture.
Is there something to it? Is there a link between creativity and the darker sides of life? Does angst help you write?
For me, I can’t get a lick done when I’m feeling down. But then again, my books involve corn dogs and space monkeys.
What about you?
It doesn't help me write, but it does help me sew. I have to be level and focused to draft my pattern, but it takes some deep geometric RAGE to get the fabric cut out.
Either that or I just hate math.
Anyway, back to the subject, I think this is another one of those places where writers can take a page from Stanislavski. Contrary to popular belief, he did not encourage actors to get emotionally worked up while on stage–it was a rehearsal technique. And like actors, I think writers can benefit from taking note of how their emotions manifest so that they can bring significant details to their work. Being observant about emotions when I'm not writing helps me more than being emotional when I am writing.
I seem to be able to write when I'm down or feeling melancholy. Even if what I'm down about is the environment or the current state of our country, I find that the words flow directly from my mind to my fingertips and onto the screen. A lot of the time I'll try to write in my journal but inevitably I wind up going back to my computer since I can type faster than I can write.
But then again, my writing isn't all puppy dogs and rainbows.
I think creative people feel things more deeply, and it's either let it out or medicate it.
Writing it out relieves the angst. It's called Getting your demons down on paper.
– Eric
I generally write about the "darker side of life". I'm not that angsty of a person, though. I'm actually an optimist. However, as a writer, I think that the more emotional, angst-filled stories and characters are the ones that are the most interesting.
Of course, only if that angst is serious and real, none of that teenage angst crap throughout Twilight.
Not for me. When my house burnt I shut down creatively. It took lots of encouragement from friends and time before I could sit and write for longer than ten minutes at a whack. I was still in the doldrums when I won your contest for opeing paragraphs and that bit of affirmation gave me the fianl kick in the arse to get back in the groove.
That's a long way of saying both no to the question at hand, and thank you for the boot to the butt.
That book (The Feedstore Chronicles) for which the opening paragraph won is now complete and I am just embarking on the query road to what I hope will be Agentville.
I'm not sure if angst helps me write, but I think angst and the darker sides to my past are reflected subconsciously in my writing. It took me to realize that none of my YA characters had mothers and it had nothing to do with trending, or the characters needing to be independent. You write what you know, and if you know angst, grief, hardship or death, you are going to write about it.
I have to say, I do think it helps…a lot.
I try to whip out my computer whenever I am feeling a "strong" emotion of some kind then find a spot in my book that involves that very emotion and translate how I feel, into the emotions of my character. It makes the characters feelings/emotions far more believable. Case and point. I am scared to death to fly. true story. but that is not the end…I pull out my laptop and write about my female MC's fear in a situation, drawing on my own fear. Good stuff.
Good question, Nathan. It's kind of funny how it works out for me. No matter what kind of mood I'm in, really up or really down, once I start writing, the story takes over. When I finish for the day, I'm mostly just worn out — but in a good way.
I guess writing is akin to therapy for me. It's a good deal cheaper, too. 🙂
@Anonymous 9:52 AM: Angst doesn't help me write; it gives me something I need to write about.
I think this is pretty right on, for me.
I've never been able to find much link, personally, between being able to write when things are peaceful and being able to write when things aren't, though if things get too over the top, yeah, I'm not good for much.
I've read of studies that look at the link between creativity and mood disorders, and IIRC, what some of them found was that there was a higher degree of mood disorder in "creative" types, but that if you looked at their families, frequently there would be people with much more severe problems, i.e., crippling depression as opposed to milder forms. So the questions that raises are: do mild mood disorders spur creativity, and/or does engaging in creative work provide some sort of protection against more severe mood disorders?
I've also read that book by the guy with the really really long unpronounceable Czech name, "Flow" (the book, not the guy) who talks about how happiness is a quantifiable state, and people who are happiest tend to be engaged in activities where they are so focused that they lose the sense of "self," of ego, and when they complete the activity, they emerge with a sense of accomplishment and a greater, more positive sense of self.
I find that novel writing, as frustrating as it can be at times, is the sort of ridiculously complex activity that satisfies my brain. Even though it also makes me kind of crazy. It's a way of making sense of experience, a sort of self-excavation at times, of seeing patterns in overwhelming masses of data, of bringing order to an existence that can seem pretty chaotic and random.
I am not sure whether this all meets the definition of "angst," but there you go.
I write my best when I'm in a deeper or slightly darker place, but if I'm feeling too bad I can't get anything done. I'd say I'm on both sides of that fence. 🙂
I have noticed that when I'm in a darker place personally, I tend to write fluff. And I hate it. I'm not a fluffy writer — except on those days. 😉 It's almost like my mind says enough and forces me to write silly scenes I normally wouldn't.
No. Doesn't help. My writer's voice is sassy, funny, light. So I'm mute when angst-y.
I can write no matter what mood I'm in because I know once I get emerged in my story, the real world goes away. Though, I did kill off a character once when I was in a bad mood…but then I felt guilty and gave her a reprieve.
Me and angst go back a long way. But he's never around when I create and/or edit. He never shows up early in the morning and that's when I get my writing done. Angst is an afternoon type.
I think this theme follows the "writing is a drug," line of logic. If your feeling terrible a good burst of writing can be very uplifting (adjective – therapeutic avoided deliberately) I am the only writer I know who begins writing within ten minutes of waking up. A myriad of problems are avoided that way. If I am truly tired or have real world activities to complete I don't write that day. Looking up the exact definition of angst I would now have to answer in the affirmative with a definite yes; even if the angst is only related to missing out on a potentially good burst of creative energy. Angst is essential and the self inflicted misery of exploring it is also essential. Even a good literary fiction writer should feel something inside died when they kill a character whose time has come. The stakes must be high for a good story. If I was to expand the angst concept using my first task of the day is writing method I would use a phrase like; engrossed in the zeitgeist of the world and people I have constructed, while taking each blow to my mostly noble and less noble characters very seriously so the survivors react and adjust accordingly. Yes angst is essential and must be as its definition implies be *acute*. Otherwise why bother.
For me, because creativity stems from emotion not logic, we need to feel to write – whether it is drama, angst, passion or happiness – we need to get that aspect of the power of LIFE into our work. If I am in a very neutral state emotionally, I can't generate anything exciting on the page. For good writing I need to be in a very focused emotional state, which can be a positive or negative one. I think some of the great writers recognized this need for capturing the emotion of life in their writing, but not letting the emotional balance tip into the destructive and downward path of depression if the focus becomes too intense. I'm thinking of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice as a writer writing about art, or Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.
Yes! A thousand times yes! Angst needs an outlet and writing is perfect, at least for me.
Great question!
No, sir, it does not. Positivity or negativity have no place in my writing. From where I stand, a man must be neutral. Emotion shouldn't craft a story. Negative emotion will make it take a spiral too far, and positive emotion will keep the story from going where it needs to go.
I write differently when I'm angsting. My writing is more for my own benefit, like a personal therapy session than if I'm set and committed to writing for writing's sake.
Thinking on it, that might be a big part of why I write in the early morning. Nothing's really happened yet to influence me, so unless something big has happened the day before, I'm starting from square one on the emotional game board.
I used to procrastinate writing terribly, and wondered if my problem was that I was too happy with my life and needed some darkness and angst to fuel my inspiration.
I didn't go seeking it, but had a bad year, and couldn't write a single thing. Now I know that at least for the kind of writing I like to do, I need to be reasonably happy and content. I haven't written any HBWSG's yet, though. (HBWSG = Heart-Breaking-Work-of-Staggering-Genius)
Angst does not let me write- I'm too involved with whatever is bothering me.But after a good session of writing something filled with angst, that stays with me for the rest of the day and poor husband has to put up with it.
Many writers drank to help themselves=must try it some day but i don't really like the taste and pepsi has no effect at all!
When I'm painting the angst works, writing not so much.
Well.. when i'm writing angst I have to 'feel' it but if actually angsting then nope – doesn't mix well with creativity 🙂
https://damselinadirtydress.blogspot.com
I find I'm able to write a lot when I have a lot of emotion, mainly because the whole going around killing people thing doesn't work out so well beyond the boundaries of my imagination. The quality of said angsty writing is left up for debate…
Lora T.
It is weird sometimes I write my best when I have had a stressful day at work ideas flow effortlessly…on the other hand, maybe it influenced my YA characters breaking up every other chapter. After a crazy day when I sit in my chair turn on the computer an overwhelming peace surrounds me and an hour or so I get lost in my world.
There have been a few short stories fuelled by angst. After midnight listening to Morrissey or The Smiths does quite nicely to set the mood for tales of love lost.
I feel the novel is fuelled by whatever I can muster sometimes!
Today the attitude to writing is procrastination.
I´ve been away all week and am not looking forward to picking up where I left off.
Well there are sort of two questions here.
The first is: is do you write when you're upset or depressed?
For me – no, although I suspect many do. But I can't write when I'm in a bad space.
The second question is: does unhappiness or emotional suffering contribute to your writing?
For me – it's why I write and it's what I write about.
I've had an unhappy life, for the most part, at times deeply unhappy. And in my job, I work with many people who have been dealt even harder hands than I have.
The drive to write for me can come from witnessing human suffering up close. When you see a deep level of human pain, it makes you want to do something, anything to make it better. You want to tell the world, try to influence it, try to heal it, try to make it better.
And when you suffer deeply yourself….I've been trying to capture this in words forever, and I probably won't be able to here. But when you are in deep emotional pain for long periods of time it changes you. It softens and cleanses. It's so hard to describe, but for me it's been like a pumice stone. It scrapes away the edges and makes the channels run clear and clean. You have access to something very deep within you, and that's the part of you that can come forth and speak through the creative process.
You also have something to say. You want to express your feelings and what you learned. For me, it's not catharsis, it's synthesis.
It's also, and this is the most important, giving meaning to pain. It's a sort of triumph to synthesize and translate what you've been through into something deeply meaningful that may touch others.
I got more serious and personal than I intended in this post, but this topic is a defining one for me.
For some reason, I'm imagining that some folks might give me a hard time for what I'm saying here. That's okay.
I'm not certainly not recommending that people suffer, by the way. But for those that have, I do think it deepens and influences their creativity in a powerful way. I think that is one of the reasons why human beings are creative – to try to give voice to power feelings that are frequently beyond words.
No. Angst makes me want to quit writing and take up drinking as a full time job. I have to be feeling good about what I do and my ability to do it. I journal when I'm angsty, but I wouldn't show that stuff to anyone because it's horrible whiny crap.
Depends on the kind of angst you're talking about. If there's a valid reason, like you're contracted to write a 60,000 word novel in three weeks, this type of angst will get you moving very fast.
But angst with regards to personal problems is not a creative incentive.
Depends what I am writing. My other half forgot my birthday for the third year running a couple of years ago. I got really miserable and annoyed and turned it into a novel about a woman whose husband not only forgets her 40th birthday but walks out on her the day before. It's a very dark romantic comedy but hey an e-publisher picked it up. My husband calls it my mid life crisis novel. So sometimes being in a dark place can be a good thing.
I write best when I'm in a good mood, for sure. But I draw on all the not so pleasant experiences in my life to write some of my more dramatic scenes, and I don't care if that suddenly depresses me.
The things I do to ty to write well. :]
wow Mira. First, you hit the nail on the head, "there are two questions here", then you blew me away, "It softens and cleanses. It's so hard to describe, but for me it's been like a pumice stone. It scrapes away the edges…" I've never thought about writing like this, but your sentence summed my writing up for me and touched me. Thanks.
Angst helps me go deeper. There is nothing that fuels the fire of my writing like needing to process something deeply on paper. The contents of my heart pour out from a well of angst when I'm "hard put" to deal with a moment of inner turmoil or struggle. In writing fiction, my characters thank me for taking them deeper. In writing non-fiction, my friends do.
It's much harder for me to write when I'm worried about the rent. General angst I can live with, but when I'm worried about my survival, it's hard to produce. I do it anyway in the hopes I'm—to paraphrase Stephen King—not shoveling shinola from a sitting position, but it's tough.
That's when I do my best writing, really. Give me a bad day and I'll give you pages of writing. I find it makes some more emotionally charged scenes more authentic. 🙂
Mira @4:54 PM,
The comment you wrote here is exquisite. Maybe you’ve found your own personal writer’s voice, even more so than in humor. It’s as good as any passage in the best literary novel I’ve ever read. You’re a very talented writer, Mira, both in humor and seriously meaningful writing. And I’m sorry that you’ve suffered. You’re such a decent and moral person, always shining a light onto questions of right and wrong. I’m so glad you’re a regular contributor to the comments section of this Blog. **hugs**
In my most reflective moments I tend to write slower, but the writing is more honest. I think for someone like me, the darker my life is, the more I am able to get in touch with my soul, and if I am able to channel that into my writing, so much the better. It's not an easy trick, but a lot of my best writing is when I'm able to connect with the deepest parts of me. That can happen when I'm wallowing through the lowest spots in my life, or when I'm experiencing some of the highest. It's all experience, and the more experience I collect, or the more true emotion I feel, the more honest my writing is.
There is a definite link between creativity and emotions. I've read that the human brain processes both creativity and emotions in the same region. Those who are highly creative have developed that part of the brain to be more accessible and more active. It only makes sense that those who create deeply also feel deeply since that is the area of the brain they tap into often.
I'm definitely one of those tortured artists. Back in the good old days, all the geniuses were crazy, but lately, many "normal" people have been publishing books. All these books are pretty cheerful and not very intellectual, such as Twilight.
I feel like writing helps me sort out my angst to cheer me up a little bit. But when I am in a good mood, I'm usually out and about having fun rather than writing.
It depends on the material, for Me. There's no way I am able to focus on the. Sci-Fi / Fantasy storytelling when My mood is sullen however My soul revealing poetic material flourishes under such circumstances.
YES!!!!!! I get some of my best work done when I'm angry and/or depressed. My emotions help create more realistic reactions for my characters. (Though it's true that I do find it difficult to write a happy scene when I'm angry. It just doesn't work somehow).
Writing when you are sad and about the 'sad' is sort of like praying, like handing it over to someone else, God, your weird next door neighbor or your smelly dog.
My dog can't read so I have to read it to him, he can sense my mood.. he puts his head in my lap…and he looks up at me with his huge brown eyes as if to say the writing is amazing and all will eventually be okay with the world…and then he farts.
Whew… his farts will shake the sad right out of ya, they are deadly.
I wonder, did Hemingway write about dog farts, I know he wrote about bull fights a lot, at least I think he did, and where there's bulls there must BS, therefore bull farts?
As you can tell I have no angst in my life right now, just a lot of bulls—.
Well, shucks, if I wrote about corn dogs and space monkeys (assuming neither of these took a turn for the dark side) then I wouldn't write when angsty either! Truth be told I use whatever mood I'm in to write effectively in whatever sequence I need to. Good mood and I have to write torture? No problem! I just have to envision the pov character's perception of it in order to write it. If I do it well then my good mood holds! If not, well, that kind of grumpy will have my hiding from my keyboard and giving the monitor dirty looks. Definitely not productive.
Hmn. For me the angst I feel does help me write. But I focus my emotions to what I need written in the books I write. Happy me is a happy character. Emo me is an emo character. Some things develop better that way, other times, I need to break away until I get back to the "right" emotions.
I will say this. Recent personal issues pushed me to write more, so in some ways, yes angst helped the story develop. But I don't think I'd want that regularly.
Another bubble bursting sharp question by our ever diligent ever thought loving and by most accounts human all human host Nathan Bransford. I think it comes down to why we write. I, personally, have a girlfriend that threatens me with a kitchen knife if I don't shut the hell up and write for the day. She loves me. So, it seems to come back to the question of why we write. Why do people write? It seems it is because writers are people who have thoughts that run 24/7 and there is no way that people will listen to us without killing us. It is the strange and lovely ability to contemplate everything human, and then some, coupled with the overwhelming need to express it. What else do we have? So, darkness and angst are part of being human. It's sort of like, like, dude, that linguists theory that everything is defined by what it is not. My best thoughts come about through anger, but since I'm a person that wants what is good I struggle my way out of my angst and come up with a life affirming thought. My grandfather would call that fighting your way out of a wet paper bag, but I call it being a person. Man, this can't be answered in a short declaration. As always, so far, great blog, Nathan.
Mira! You just got "Ulysses"!
I've in the recent past read some of the bios of a number of movie stars, musicians, etc.
A disproportionate number come from extremely trying circumstances.
I am not giving you a hard time, Mira. I think, as someone else said, you hit the nail right on the head.
Writing–all art, which ultimately is a form of (hopefully) communication, to me, at least–is a form of expression, making it a form of release.
People are told when they have trouble sleeping to write a list of the things that they're worrying about, presumably to have it out of their minds until the next morning.
Back when I was much younger, and one of the un-named poseurs of the time, the general belief was that to be a great writer, or artist of any real worth, you had to either have a dominant mother, an abusive father, or at the very least a dysfunctional family. Not to mention a good, "searing" physical or at least emotional wound.
Now. I would argue that non-posing artists have a soul like a sponge–they absorb life that most people are just as comfortable not seeing, not knowing about, or perhaps not even contemplating. But the artist's soul has a use for what it absorbs, what it thirsts for–experiences.
Experiences and knowing something about how your life is composed by a series of such things, a reason why I'm convinced cloning may create a physical or physiological replica, but will never, and can never, reproduce a personality.
Hemingway's life, for instance, wasn't all that tragic. He was an upper-middle-class kid from a large home with a doctor father and a somewhat over-the-possibility one-time opera singer. He went to the tail-end of The War to End all Wars, and got wounded handing out chocolate and cigarettes as part of a canteen set up by The American Red Cross, probably in an area he wasn't supposed to be, a few months after arriving in Italy.
But that's not the sum total of his life. In fact, it's not event the sum total of his war experience, even the first one. Because after being wounded by shrapnel from an exploding shell in a trench that had become a crater, he picked up a wounded soldier, put the guy over his back in what's now called a "fireman's carry," and struggled–while wounded–to get the guy to a first aid station.
And that's not all. On his way, he got wounded again, by a machine gun trying to cut him down with the guy on his back. And he still made it to the aid station. With the soldier on his back.
His First World War experience was hardly characteristic of a "quitter."
And his "continue on" sentiment came through in his prose, loud and clear, regardless of the circumstances.
It was his end that was indeed tragic, old before his time, physically, from experiences that came after his 18th birthday.
And, one could argue, mentally as well.
When I was younger and something I thought especially angst-y had happened to me, I'd hole up in the large walk-in closet in the bedroom that first was my parents' bedroom until they built an extension to their house and it became my bedroom, and write.
And I'd tell my parents if my friends called, "tell them I've got a novel to write."
And my friends would know something had bothered me.
The last major angst-y thing that happened to me, in 2002, got me back writing again. Not because I was posing, but because I realized I'd stopped expressing things I'd been bottling up somewhere along the road and needed to find my way again.
The minute I put pen to paper, and thought to fingers to pen to paper, it was like when I sat upon a motorcycle for the first time in nearly 20 years, fired it up and put it in gear and let the clutch out slowly…
Pumice is a fantastic metaphor, by the way, Mira. You may argue otherwise, but the way you expressed your thoughts in this last post…look out, Franzen…:)
“Does angst help you write?”
Angst does not help me write. However, it helps my writing because without evil, how can we know good? Perspective of both extremes lends towards the creative muse, but rarely can I write while indulging in either extreme.
While down and depressed, stressed, feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders, writing does not work well except for recording some notes for later use. While laughing and feeling high on life, writing feels like work. When the storms are over and skies begin clearing, writing is powerful. I call this the “gray zone” or twilight when the sun is at an angle to the earth making it neither day nor night.
No.
Angst can be a good motivator. My novel was about a plane crash. Once I'd finished it, I overcame my fear of flying. Writing can be therapy.