Suffering for Art

Unless you count emails at work, my plan to write daily isn’t going very well. You might count the goings on in my imagination, I suppose, as there’s always something brewing in there. I am more productive if I get the scene/story ordered in my head before I tackle the computer. Going in cold rarely achieves ignition.

I wonder why I do it at all.

At the beginning of January, Erin Morgenstern posted a piece on her blog that struck a chord. She intends to write her follow up to The Night Circus in 2014, but expressed some doubt about how to accomplish it. She’s much happier with life now than she was then, so liking the world outside her head is interfering with the world inside her head. She finally confessed that she started writing to escape a sadness that no longer exists. At the beginning, she wrote to escape.

So did I.

My arthritis was diagnosed shortly after I discovered the joy of creating my own stories. I loved to read, as did (does) my whole family, but for me, writing took that pleasure to another, all-consuming level. After delivering the good news to my mother and me, the doctor added the bonus info that I’d have to cut back on the writing, as the physics of it were likely to cause more problems than the disease alone.

That very night, I started writing a new story. I recall nothing of it except that it was as much an act of defiance as of creativity. I had dabbled with words since age ten. At thirteen, I flung my arms around the practice and held on for dear life. From then on, writing was my escape, my sanctuary from a world where the struggle against pain reigned supreme. For years, arthritis was my real life and writing was how I coped with it. I actually did let up in my twenties, when the worst seemed over and my life got happier. I still use it as a coping mechanism, but overall, my inner world is darker and scarier than my outer one.

I understand what EM is saying. Great art, be it literature, music or painting, is often born of the artist’s suffering and subsequent urge to escape some form of pain—a broken heart, a broken child, a broken faith. Time and again, I’ve heard poets and musicians say their best work was done in their darkest moments. Happily, it’s not set in stone that beauty must come from pain. After all these years, writing is my habit as much as my escape. At times, I don’t even think about it; I just do it. Whether it began as a hidden part of me or it arrived later to save me from my angst, it’s very much a part of me now. If I had to stop, I’d as soon stop breathing.

EM says she must learn to write while she’s happy. She’s so gifted that I’m sure she’ll succeed. As for me … I’ll leave the suffering to my characters. I’m fine without it.