Must a writer suffer for their art?

I'm not sure what you mean. The torment frames artistic creation? Like a supporting structure? That's not the image that comes to my mind when I think of the emotional experiences of the artist in relation to the art produced. Art is a way of expressing emotion. You sing, you laugh, you cry, you write a poem, you write a story, you do a painting. How is this faking it?

 

Mental health is a factor in the creative process, but generally speaking, things like writing and art tend to be more for therapeutic function than 'high art' , music and exercise to a certain degree as well.

(From a historical perspective considering how many painters, writers, musicians have participated in their art and how many we actually know about.)

A key driving force in the creative process is being able to focus and in a fashion channel one's emotions. A skill that is hard to learn, even tougher to master.

I was a little kid with huge emotions, way too big for me to handle and this is one of this skills that was absolutely necessary.

ADHD/Autistic with (RSD)Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (basically, you know the emotional reaction is completely out of proportion for the trigger and you are mad at yourself because of your overraction, over which you literally have no control because of how your brain is wired) and alexithymia. You learn to inventory your brain and how to divert a potential overflow, how to brake and disengage even when you want to try. (The term control freak is apt).

My go-tos are writing and repetitive, high intensity motion (a swing, trampoline, or my yoga ball), always with music.

It is akin to learning how to drive a manual transmission by the feel of the engine, such control is a learned behaviour.

Psychology is still a very young science. Many classic writers had what are known as the 'artistic temperaments'. The angst and the muse inextricably linked through a historical lack of comprehension and viable context.

Drugs and alcohol also play a significant role in stirring the pot. Historical context is a huge factor, but the core archetypal patterns of mental health tessellate across the spectrum.

Emotions aren't classified as good, bad, and ugly. They are what they are and they don't discriminate when they happen. What matters are our actions and the outcome. (Constructive, neutral (inaction) , or destructive.)

Write a poem expressing one's wrath because your boss was a jerk that day. Kudos on being constructive. Is the piece something that needs to be shared? It is in the finite details that the devils hide.

Quality. Follow through. Viability of a project. And objectivity...

All too often the darling project is near and very dear to a writer's heart. There is no emotional space (4th wall) from the work and an author gets upset because a reader's comment(s) aren't entirely complimentary. The writer sees the opinion of a work as an opinion reflected upon themselves.

I love logic, my family often tease me about being part Vulcan, but people forget that Spock had a half brother, Sybok who marched to the beat of his own drummer and essentially became a very charismatic cult leader, but his belief in his quest, his purpose was genuine. The pathological aspects got channeled into an Obscurial on Sha Ka Ree at the center of the Milkway.



Life is what we make of the hand we are dealt. Creativity is one of the major coping mechanisms that developed out of those challenges. A spectrum within itself the creative process has primordial roots, is constantly evolving, and requires a bit of perspective to be an effective tool.

 

People and experiences cause us to laugh and cry. If we write about grief or love, we do it with lived experience as frame of reference. We may struggle to convey all this exactly as we wish, but when the process of creation supplants or supersedes the very thing it's designed to depict it all becomes just a bit self-absorbed and egotistical. I always baulk when coming across the concept of the tormented artist, as though the artist feels things more deeply or is any more tormented than anyone else trying to get through their day as best they can. It impresses as excusatory. I don't know that the torment of an artist with a blank page compares with that of a small business owner whose books won't balance.

 

One of the pitfalls of the 'tortured artist' trope is the victim mentality.

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-is-a-victim-mentality

And this is one of those aspects that the title of the thread really brings to mind. If you've ever encountered one of these individuals it is a unique experience to say the least.

 

I never meant to imply there was a rank. Why do we need to rank the emotional experiences of people? Every single person on this earth has their own internal emotional experiences. And art is the emotional expression of the artist.

You've alluded to "egotistical" as something bad, but I would argue that ego is a necessity for the artist. As a writer, you've got to believe that what you think about is important.

And so the small business owner goes to his basement and paints a phoenix rising. That makes him an artist.

 

Cash-in sequels though. Believing someone will pay for it is too good a substitute.

 

I think we might view the central concept of this thread differently but am happy to co-exist.

 

This thread has really gone off the rails. I'll try again. In the OP, I tried to capture what the creative process of producing an original piece of fiction looks like. What producing art looks like. This is in contrast to producing a story with the assistance of generative AI. And I wondered, if you don't go through that painstaking process, can what you produce be considered art?

Sorry for not being more clear.

 

I can do a lot with two minutes and a cell phone, no AI, no angst and turn out very decent work. It comes down to things as basic as skill and initiative.

Emotions may be involved, but aren't requisite to a good result. Relying too much on the emotive end, again, taps into the psychological aspects of things like task initiation and procrastination.

A writer's process and context is the writer's alone. But trying to define art or define the worth of work is like trying to clone a cat. Their genome is too large too allow for it to happen. You can get similar base traits, but never an exact replica.

Some people can work on a single paragraph for days and still end up sounding like a dying cement truck. There are people who cannot write, but sing wonderfully. But is the tone deaf guy's rendition of Heart of Glass worth less than the original by Blondie if he finds happiness in it.

Context and any sort of value are determined by the individual, not an arbitrary metric of vague, undefined standards of worth.

To wit: One of the best gifts anyone has ever given me was a mostly dead String of Pearls succulent. I love taking on sad houseplants and seeing if I can bring them back. My best friend knows this. She saw that plant and bought it for me just because. The sales lady thought she was nuts, but I still have that String of Pearls and it is bouncing back nicely.

 

This is the very heart of Stoicism. "If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." ― Marcus Aurelius

Similar: "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." — Shakespeare (who obviously knew him some Stoicism).

... And of course, Vulcans were based on the Stoics, though somewhat different.

 

Confusion is coming from different kinds of suffering being discussed here. It's creating some turmoil in the thread, haha. I think people see the word 'suffering' and immediately think of the starving artist. That's what initially came to my mind.

You're talking about general suffering and how it defines/enriches/drives us, and that's fine, but Louanne's talking about the suffering as a result of the particular labour of writing and how enriching it is for the final product and perhaps the author's psyche. If I could send a message back in time, I might suggest the word 'effort' instead, which still has suffering wrapped into it, but in the applied sense.

My question about magnitude and degree may have made it seem like I was reducing it to a formula, but really I wanted to test the notion by putting it to an extreme. If pain of labour = good, then it would reasonably follow that more pain = better, and to ∞ (or at least before it reaches the point that the work will not be completed)
But that's an intentionally leading question on my part because most people would not agree with that, which means it demands that other factors be considered.

Spoiler: I think my writing group is a little unorthodox...

I just can't will myself to claim that effort is always important. Basically I can't parse 'death of the author' and 'significant effort is required for good/meaningful art' together. Those two notions clash hard, in particular on the extremes of low effort by an amazing mind, or in contrast high effort from an underwhelming mind—the latter could equate to some of the worst, most incestuously derivative Harry Potter fan fiction we've ever read.

 

Yes, I'm encompassing the whole subject of suffering, in its small as well as large aspects, and presenting the psycholgical understanding of it that I'm aware of. What everyone else is talking about are specific subsets of that. It's like I'm talking about the whole elephant and you're seeing only a trunk while she sees only a leg.

This is my penchant to look at things in the philosophical way, which is to step back and try to get the whole picture first. You want to understand that and then you can place and understand the various smaller aspects of it. But if you just muck around with the small parts you might never grasp the larger picture that puts them all into perspective.

Plus most people here don't seem aware of some of the findings, like post traumatic growth, that are discussed in the articles I linked to. Maybe it's necessary to actually write that stuff in here directly, I think most people are just ignoring the links.

 

Often the extremes don't tell you much about the general trends. Imagine an amazing mind that worked harder. And yes, some minds just aren't capable of great writing. They might be much better at something else. Nobody ever said suffering will make all your dreams come true, or that all suffering will necessarily improve your art or anything else. I specifically said that it isn't the suffering itself, but the ability to find meaning or purpose from it afterwards (maybe years or decades after) that cause the therapeutic effects.

 

Does it seem so? Sorry to express a related thought instead of sticking closely to the agenda. Didn't mean to cause a problem.

 

I'm trying to stay within the scope of the OP. Leg or trunk it may be. I initially shot too wide. She clarified, so I tailored my next response appropriately. I still disagree with her in certain ways, just more specifically (haha, sounds arrogant, but I intended it in sportsmanlike tone).

I can absolutely respect a wide approach to a narrow subject. However, I don't agree with demanding one in this casual context. Aspects such as post traumatic growth don't strike me as particularly new in the sphere of general knowledge, so as not to shake/improve my understanding of suffering in general or in how it relates to effort.

In other words I'm going to take the outline of the elephant for granted until I see a reason not to, because I know what elephants look like, and the discussion seems to have been be founded with that pretense in mind. The broader topic of suffering's composite parts might warrant its own thread.

 

I'm a bit surprised that there is a bit of a divide on the interpretation of the OP. It makes me wonder if the authors who didn't get your original intent haven't really "suffered" in the sense of trying to put a story together? Maybe some people simply have an easier time writing their stories?

Interesting...

 

Oh wow, I had no idea this was a new thread. Sorry, there's an old one with basically the same title, I assumed it was that thread resurrected.

 

You're right, the connection to AI was entirely lost on me and my focus was on the notion of suffering. Writing certainly ain't easy. I regularly spend whatever length of time trying to progress a story, write bundles of words and end up with less than I started. Just wouldn't call it suffering though.

If the thread is about AI then my view is that AI is to story-telling as Twitter is to letter-writing.

I'm waiting for the holy books to be modernised. St Paul's tweet to the Corinthians: sup dudes lol be gooder pmfao later

 

I also misinterpreted the original post and would like to apologize for that.

If I understand correctly, you're asking if we suffer on the writing journey?

I would say not me personally, yet. I enjoy the journey, pouring down my character's thoughts and actions. I enjoy getting things on the page, and I seem to have an easy time coming up with a story. The hard part I haven't gotten to yet, publishing. I am sure I will sweat blood when the time comes to getting out there in a serious way.

 

Thank you. I did make a miscalculation that "Must an artist suffer for their art?" could be interpreted only one way, the way you have described it here. For that I apologize.

Hmm ... I think the Law of Diminishing Returns might apply. There is a point of maximum output, beyond that, more input (suffering) leads to less output (art).

Spoiler: Diminishing Returns graph

True. We can't make any exact predictions about the quality of the writing based on effort in single cases. But as a trend, I think it's safe to say that good writing is rarely easy.

 

I have to take some of the responsibility for the confusion. Reminds me of getting feedback on a story to the effect of "you didn't give enough to the reader." Maybe I should have mentioned in the OP "in contrast to AI-generated writing."

But it's all good, lots of valid and interesting points were made.

Maybe story-writing is easier for some than for others. Makes sense. But the notion of the artist suffering during the creative process is well established.

Even Hemingway, known for his sparse style, said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

 

Honestly unless one has a handicap that requires assistance technology to communicate effectively, I have to wonder why people would want to use prescripted, nonprimary source media?

It is akin to writing an RPG campaign out of a player's handbook and calling it an original work, despite the fact six other players and their characters were involved. There are a lot of parallels to the precursor and occasionally touchy subject of fan fiction.

Morally it feels like cheating, (but that is just my brain saying that). From a personal standpoint, I also don't want other people's creations wandering around in my constructs. RPGs and collaborative projects are an entirely different gear and mind set than an independent creative work.

That being said, how much of the 'suffering' is derived from us actually learning, growth not just intellectually, but emotionally, from the process of organic writing. How much of that growth 'experience points' is/are lost when we turn over active problem solving to an AI engine because Questing Guy painted himself into a corner. We don't fix the mistake, so we don't learn how to adapt and pivot.

What is easy, instead of right. (Not that there is a wrong way to write, but rather the function of manual transmissions and nonsense. The ability to shift gears independently rather than depending on a program and the utterly human capacity to leap beyond logic.)

 

I used to think the same way, but that was before I knew what suffering really meant.

Humans suffer. Artists simply express their suffering in a way that helps others acknowledge their own feelings.

 

My writing came out of suffering. The first thing I ever wrote not in the context of my work was a forty page suicide note a little over twenty years ago. I was seriously suffering. I went into it crying into the keyboard about some things that had recently left me bleeding and it drifted into my rather interesting life. At the end, helped by self committal to a "facility," I got better. I was drinking heavily through the episode.

Now I do 'suffer' to tell compelling stories. Some of them are cautionary tales about trust and greed and self-delusion that draw heavily from what I now realize has been a very interesting life. I had a career in technology and never tried to write creatively until I was in my forties. I did read a lot of quality contemporary fiction before that and it helps.