Writers Versus The World: How Writers are Different from Everyone Else

Think of any daring, talented and interesting writer—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Didion, Sontag, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Baldwin, Mailer, David Foster Wallace, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ottessa Moshfegh, Zadie Smith, Elif Batuman, etc—and you instantly see that the art stems from an intriguing, even dangerous artist. This is causal: Writers are generally an unusual lot. They are weird, freakish, isolated, individual, “different.” The wild eccentric weirdos who the rest of society seems flummoxed and yet often captivated by.

This doesn’t describe all writers, of course. There are the boring, tried and true stories of cold MFA programs, typical lives lived for typical reasons. But more often than not, writers are the ones who see things in a much deeper, more full way than the average bear (both a blessing and a curse), who are highly sensitive (for both good and ill), who wear their hearts on their sleeves, who have a black smear of self-indulgent narcissism and desire desperately to be “heard and understood,” who are vulnerable and yet simultaneously somehow aloof, who seem to always be documenting everything in their lives. They “see” things in life from different angles, vantage points and perspectives than most people.

Many writers—myself very much included—do not live conventional or typical or “normal” lives. We are in fact not “normal” people. This isn’t to say writers are better than anyone or somehow superior; actually if anything I’d argue that writers are in some ways disastrous failures: We are usually (but not always) deeply wounded and insecure and seek constant inner and outer validation from a society which refuses to give it. Especially today, at a time when books seem to either be read much less often, or else be startlingly ideological.

My point is a neutral one: Writers, by and large, are their own breed. I am almost 13 years sober and even in AA circles people think differently of alcoholic writers versus just general alcoholics. Writers are very commonly alcoholics; it doesn’t take more than a second to conjure up the old familiar names of famous literary drunks: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Kerouac, London, Wallace, King, etc. This of course makes sense: Writers being so hyper self- and other-aware, highly sensitive, how could many of them not be alcoholics? Ditto suicide.

Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear attempts to annihilate this notion I’m presenting, making the claim that just because you’re a writer doesn’t mean you have to be tied to the old fashioned and anachronistic and unhealthy idea that you should be mentally or psychologically sick. I like the book. A lot, actually. Everyone should read it. And I don’t necessarily disagree with the basic premise: To be a writer you don’t have to be broken. There is a 20th century myth that in order to be and survive as a writer you must be totally self-destructive, must drink to blackout, must be incredibly wounded and in constant spiritual pain. I do not think this is true.

That said, the history of 20th century writers and writing cannot be ignored, and it is rife with alcoholism, suicide, violence, suffering. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s experience. I don’t encourage mimicry. I encourage all people to live their truest, most authentic lives. Be “who you are,” unless, like the existentialists (say like Sartre and Camus) you don’t believe in any inherent “self.”

I speak personally here. I am one of these broken, wounded writers. Not broken as in unfixable or completely ruined and useless. Broken as in somehow spiritually bent into an inner symbolic shape which is not like most others. Other writers get it. My “breed,” my “tribe.” I come from a writing family. My mother is an author. My maternal uncle. Two cousins.

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