29d • General discussion
The Tortured Writer. Is It Real, or Is It a Story We Tell Ourselves?
There is an old idea that follows writers everywhere.
To create something true, you have to suffer.
That the pain is the price of the work. We half believe it. Sometimes we even romanticize it.
Months ago I watched a series of episodes on YouTube interviewing famous screenwriters from the film world. I was going through a hard time myself, and hearing them say that it wasn't true, that writers don't have to suffer or be depressed in order to write, that they were happy, I thought: well, I'd be happy too if I had the right connections. We all know that in cinema, like in music, there is a handful of people who write and get paid well. The others, well, peanuts, as we say in Italian.
What is the truth?
So a psychiatrist decided to actually test it.
In the 1980s, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa, ran the first rigorous scientific study on the question. She had access to one of the most prestigious creative writing programs in the world, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, whose faculty over the years included Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, and Richard Yates.
She studied 30 writers, compared them with a matched control group of people in non-creative professions, and used proper diagnostic criteria rather than anecdotes.
Her hypothesis going in was that the writers would be mostly healthy. She was wrong.
She found that 80 per cent of the writers had experienced some form of mood disturbance in their lives, compared with 30 per cent in the control group.
The result was published in 1987, and it still echoes today.
There was also something else, the same traits appeared in the writers' close relatives, which suggested that creativity and mood disturbance might run together in families.
So the tortured writer is real. Case closed.
Except it isn't, and this is the part I find most important.
Andreasen herself resisted the romantic reading of her own data. Her conclusion was not that the suffering created the writers. It was almost the opposite. These people became writers not because of their pain, but in spite of it.
The work was not the product of the darkness. The work was what they built while carrying it.
The study has its critics: a small sample, handpicked subjects, and debated diagnostic methods.
Science is rarely as clean as a headline wants it to be.
Here is where it gets personal for me.
Writing is one of the few places we are allowed to put that suffering down on the table, look at it in the light, and shape it into something another human being can hold. The page does not require the pain. The page receives it.
And the environment matters more than we admit.
The room you write in. The people who believe you, or don't. The job that drains you before you reach the desk. The silence you can or cannot find. We like to imagine the writer as a lone genius wrestling the void, but most of us are just trying to find an hour, and a little peace, and a reason to believe the work is worth finishing.
So I want to ask you something honest today.
What is the relationship between your writing and your pain? Does the work come from the difficult places, or is it the thing that helps you survive them? And what in your environment, your home, your people, your daily life, helps you write, or quietly stops you?
I'll be in the comments. 👇
2
4 comments
The Tortured Writer. Is It Real, or Is It a Story We Tell Ourselves?
powered by
skool.com/marcello-iori-7056
A home for storytellers who want to write and share their best work and build a career through writing. Best Creative Writing Masterclass lives HERE
Suggested communities
Powered by