You don’t have to be mad to be a writer, but maybe it helps!

A study published this week by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden reported that creativity is often part of a mental illness and that writers are particularly susceptible. Apparently, those of us who write are at higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, depression and even substance abuse. We are almost twice as likely as the general population to kill ourselves.  Sobering but unsurprising stuff.

Indeed there are ample examples from our literary past to support this. Virginia Woolf, Hans Christian Andersen, Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene all suffered from mental illness, though whether, if you take the universe of writers as opposed to a few well known examples, the premise stands up remains open to question.

But if the findings are correct, why should that be? What is it in the make-up of a writer that makes them prone to mental illness or, to be more accurate, what is it in the make-up of a depressive that makes them likely to be a good writer?  Certainly we can all identify with the moment when we convince ourselves that everything we have written is terrible and that we’re not really good enough to be a writer at all. Self-doubt and writing go hand in hand.

Perhaps it is because writers need to see the world from a different point of view. They need to take themselves out of the mix and view the world from a separate place. Maybe it’s not in the writer’s nature to take every incident, relationship or new person at face value but to turn our inquisitive minds instead to where each fits in to the patchwork of life. It’s the writer’s pre-occupation to see whatever happens to them or around them as the potential starting point of a new story. It’s the writer’s pre-occupation to be more aware of human frailties and human mortality in setting our behaviours and our values in context. And for awareness of human frailties and mortality, you can read awareness of our own individual frailties and mortality. This means we ask ourselves the challenging, difficult questions of life that we want our characters to confront and answer, which in turn means we must confront and answer them for ourselves. And it is this that can make us prone to introspection and depression.

How many of us have found the things we say or feel being out of kilter with the views of our friends? Perhaps our thought processes are genuinely different. I remember observing that if this was essentially as good as life was going to get and then we die, why not cut to the chase sooner and kill yourself? To me this was a legitimate question. Why put up with the crap that life throws at you and struggle when you can just go straight to the end game? I was genuinely shocked how many people found this a shocking question to even ask, let alone a shocking position to adopt. I still am.

Writing instead can become an escape from this depression. Writers can create the world and the characters that help them work through the self-doubt, to find the answers that our inner voice or inner critic poses of us and, as Edgar Allen Poe famously said, use our ability to write as a “desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”

A window on our world or a route out of it?

In a fast-moving digital world, where CGI and 3d can create and transport us to environments and worlds we previously had to use our own imaginations to visit, I am not sure anything has yet been created with a greater power to move than the written word.

Throughout the last couple of centuries time and again writers have successfully peeled back the veneer of society and cast a light on things that have disturbed us, shamed us, empowered us and, often by revealing the power of the human spirit at the same time, moved us. The thought of a society without To Kill A Mockingbird highlighting the racial injustice of America in the xxxxs is inconceivable. How clear would be our knowledge of Victorian England, the poverty and the hardships, without Dickens and his searing descriptions of Victorian workhouses? What reveals more about our ability to become feral than Golding’s Lord of the Flies? And more latterly works like The Lovely Bones, We Need To Talk About Kevin and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time have enhanced our understanding the human condition but in a way that has never been at the expense of the intent to entertain. The two are not and should not be mutually exclusive.

This is how I like to write. I enjoy the challenge of taking ordinary people and placing them in extraordinary situations and then working through the process of how they – and therefore how I - would react if confronted by such extremes. 

Sometimes, though, we may not want to open a window onto our world; we want instead to find an escape route from it. And here again great writing has the capacity to transport us. The likes of Rowling, Pratchett, Tolkein and others have created worlds away from our own where, through the power of their imaginations and subsequently our own, we have been able to build parallel worlds for us to inhabit in our minds. Subsequently, of course, movie adaptations have removed from us the responsibility of viewing those worlds purely through our own mind's eye but that merely reflects the the undeniable fact that the source of all entertainment is the power of great writing.

So I am firmly in the camp that breadth is best. As with music, where I don't believe that rock is better than pop, or soul better than rap, I only believe there is good music. The same is true of books. Whatever the genre, whatever the story, no-one approach is supreme: there is merely great writing and less great writing and all writers strive to be in the former. The beauty and the beast of it, of course, is that it is never us who decides whether we have achieved it.