In case if you never knew, Stephen King’s father mysteriously ran away one day leaving him and his poor mother on their own. This led him to write his spectacular novel, “The Shining“. Virginia Woolf suffered from extensive mental disorders before committing suicide. While being one of the greatest writers of all time, Edgar Allan Poe, had to experience the loss of his loved ones before getting him worked up in creating his dexterous works- “Annabel Lee” & “The Raven”
Life truly plays its ominous games with writers ones in a while and perhaps this may in fact inspire them to continue with their works. Sounds crazy… Isn’t it? But it is in fact true for most Creative Writers. One day, one of my chat friends over Facebook once showed me a piece of her writings and I was completely amused. I asked her if she wanted to continue with her writing. Her reply was: “I can only write when I am really depressed or feeling very lonely.” Her answer in fact shuddered me as I went into reminiscing the depressed lives of other legendary writers.
Researcher J. Anderson Thomson Jr., MD, a staff psychiatrist at the University of Virginia Student Health Services and the university’s Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy, claimed, “Depression’s role with creative writing will also be a function of the individual writers, their personal history, their circumstances, and the nature of their depressions.”
This case is rather enticing, isn’t it? My thoughts are that when a person tends to experience reactive depression, he/she needs to release that negative energy and for that pen starts doing the talking. Now for the creativity part. When that person is seemingly crushed within the jaws of depression, the mind starts becoming active, continuously seeking for some fruitful pleasure or some inner peace to cope up with all the negativity and thus the mind becomes a pleasure seeker and goes more engaged seeking for vivid words to reflect the feelings. The more the writing turns creative, the more heart finds peace and this in turn becomes a habit and with this new venture of finding the inner tranquility, the habit blooms and finally a writer is born.
Originally published in my LinkedIn account.
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