You can be well-adjusted and a great artist

There’s this idea that great artists have to suffer. But everyone suffers. That is enough. You don’t have to seek it out. If it was only great suffering that made great art, there’d be a lot more of it, frankly. The idea that artists have to be disturbed is a fraud.1 This is magical thinking.

The romantic mythos of the artist-addict perhaps came from Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s exposé of Edgar Allen Poe’s drunken dysfunction, which inadvertently birthed a legend.2

These days, substance abuse is not a common theme in fiction, but the addiction memoir, ending in recovery, is in vogue.2

  1. How to Write One Song ch. 4 ↩

  2. Where Have All the Artist-Addicts Gone? - The New York Times ↩ ↩2

Notes mentioning this note

Best practices for sad songwriting
Best practices for sad songwriting Don’t just write sad songs. Mary Gauthier said at Folk Alliance International 2023 that songwriters...
Creativity is like a healthy psychosis
Creativity is like a healthy psychosis U.K. Mann says boredom is “a search for neural stimulation that isn’t satisfied. If...