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/lit/ - Literature

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12093605 No.12093605 [Reply] [Original]

Why is it that (good) authors tend to be gloomy and depressed?

Does it take a depression to deepen your emotional intellect or something?

>> No.12093609

>>12093605
are you telling me this meme came from a real Reddit thread?
Reddit is fucking unbelievable

>> No.12093623

>>12093609
yeah
https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/50zgb0/post_your_opening_sentence/d787e7a

>> No.12093809

>>12093605
I haven't seen this shit in so long....holy.....I want more...

>> No.12093861
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12093861

>>12093605
This is in response to an op about the Hemingway quote that happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing he knows. Writers are gloomy because they are pretentious and think it makes them look smart.

>> No.12093949

>>12093605
>Why is it that (good) authors tend to be gloomy and depressed?
I don't think that it does. Writing is an activity that requires a lot of solitude and introspection, things that can be linked to unhappy people so it wouldn't surprise me to see that more writers tend to be more melancholic than the general population but not anywhere near the degree that is held in popular culture.

Part of it is a confirmation bias. If you are looking for it you will find it but you won't notice if someone doesn't conform to that image. A large part is also cultural. If one considers societies of leisure where aristocrats (or other such people free from normal cares are encouraged to write–such as Heian Japan or 17th Century France, Japanese Zen Buddhist monasteries–then one encounters many writers with no evidence of any sort of angst beyond what one would consider perfectly normal.
There have been many threads on this board about this very topic and I see people who believe it to be true often pick apart someones life looking for damage. Everyone has periods of unhappiness or something similar in ones life and a lot of people have to deal with one point or another something difficult. But since most people go through such things it's normal. For such things you can't claim how writers are depressed without also saying that so are plumbers and you need to be unhappy to be a good plumber.

>> No.12094001

>>12093605
You know what’s even more strange? Start reading about the great writers who had epileps. It’s practically a prerequisite to literary genius.

>> No.12095014

>>12093861
If they were happy they wouldn't write you dummy. The only happy writer I know was Goethe. Maybe Victor Hugo.
Usually writers and most artists have found a way to sublimate their misery and extreme loneliness to creative effort

>> No.12095048

because people who are lonely and sad live vicariously through outlets and normal people live vicariously through other people

>> No.12095473

Most people are gloomy and depressed, they just don't my diary desu about it

>> No.12095493

Sometimes the search for truth takes you to grim places. Sometimes the truth is a dead body. There's a whole universe of human experience that is negatively aspected. To shut it out is to shut out half, or a large portion, of experience. The whole point of writing is to explore the textures of experience and the possibilities it contains.