Crazy, crazy, crazy

Films label writers as 'insane'

Jack Torrance: abusive, drunken father from Stephen King's "The Shining," played by Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick's film version of the novel, who sees ghosts in an empty hotel and maniacally attacks his wife and son with a cricket bat. His occupation: writer. Melvin Udall: the protagonist of the 1997 film "As Good as it Gets," also played by Nicholson, a cranky scrooge full of wicked insults and devoid of social grace, battling a lonely, loveless life and a vicious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. His occupation: writer. William Forester, the J.D. Salinger-esque recluse from Gus Van Sant's film "Finding Forester," played by Sean Connery, who hides in a darkened apartment, shut out from society. His occupation: writer.

Then there are the real-life cases. Ernest Hemingway descended into a depression that ended with the blast of a shotgun. James Ellroy took the path of crime fiction after his mother was murdered. Salman Rushdie and Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa calling for the author's assassination. Madness, depression, alcoholism, womanizing, murder, suicide — the "Literature of Despair" as the late Joseph Heller describes this parallel trend of literature and unhappiness among its creators.

Both fictionally and non-fictionally, I have the impression that there is a disturbing generalization made about writers as over-the-top, compulsive, kooky, insane (criminally and mentally) ... you'd be better off adding your own stream of adjectives, most of which I'm sure aren't pleasant. Are these fictitious writers whom film and literature portray entertaining? Sure they are. Does it bother me, however, that a lot of the fictional writers I see and read are eccentric wrecks and social idiots? Sure it does. It bothers me because not every writer is like that. There are writers out there, I'm sure, who are social demigods, who attract women or men like bees to honey and who live stable, healthy lives, without any of the depression or numerous other problems that plague the imaginary writers of popular culture and the real writers of the world.

I'm a writer myself, and I don't go around swinging axes and slobbering like a rabid dog; I don't pop a bag of popcorn and stare into the abyss for hours on end until I realize what a mess life is and decide to depart it in the most creative way. I think I'm a "normal" person (although your perception and my perception may conflict with one another), and so are a lot of other writers out there — writers who sit down at their desks, write for a few hours and then put their pens or word processors aside and walk the dog or cook dinner or take the kids to a movie (an animated film about a wacky writer).

But for those real life writers who do suffer through innumerable struggles, for those who have stuck their heads into ovens, committed themselves to asylums or live the invisible lives that Thomas Pynchon dreams about, where does all this negativity come from? I've always believed that the creative arts are just as complex and complicated as manual labor. There are those blue collar workers who gripe about how easy it must be to write for a living, as if the act of writing were as effortless as typing an e-mail; but the majority of the writer's work goes on inside the head.

To put it another way, writing is 95 percent mental and 5 percent physical (the physical percentage composed of flipping through pages of drafts, making appearances at bookstores and cashing in royalty checks). When things get too heated for a manual laborer, he or she can always retreat into his or her mind for recuperation. With writers, however, if something terrible happens throughout the mental process of creating characters, incidents, morals and themes, there is nowhere to go. This makes it not surprising in the least to discover the prevalence of mental illness among history's greatest literary masters that in turn leads to suicide cases like Hemingway and Sylvia Plath.

I've always believed that writers see life differently than others. I've envisioned writing as a great big window outside of which lie all the mysteries and meanings of life that people spend their existence searching for. Most of us just get to peek through the blinds at infrequent intervals and are quite content with this. Some writers, however, whose whole careers are based upon the minute examination of what lies outside the window, rip the blinds off the frame and in turn are overwhelmed by what they see (imagine the death of the villains at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," all melted flesh and sagging eyeballs).

My advice to writers: Learn the skill of peeking and peeping and you'll survive the psychological difficulties writing entails.

In the end, there is always a price to pay for greatness. Movie stars pay that price with their broken-home childhoods and their multi-million dollar divorces. It seems that writers are not exempt from this "tax" either.

Perhaps the personal plagues of history's writers are what they have to endure in order to create amazing works. Do all writers have to pay this price? No. I'm sure you could name a few who've squeaked by with all their marbles intact. But what makes a writer's life and work so important and immortal is the challenges he or she overcame (or succumbed to) while creating works of honesty and life. To paraphrase Brian Shelby, a character from the film "Vanilla Sky," played by Jason Lee, "Life is sour and sweet. And without the sour, the sweet just ain't as sweet."

His occupation: writer.