2.1: Writers are Mythical, Magical, and Damaged

Authors: 

• Teri Holbrook, Georgia State University 
• Melanie Hundley, Vanderbilt University 

In two recent conversations, we heard comments that show the images of writers people carry in their heads. “Oh, you know how writers are,” said one guest to another over dinner. “They live in a garret and observe the world from somewhere above the rest of us.” At a bookstore, a middle-school student stood among the stacks of books and stated, “Authors aren’t real people. They’re like fairies who wave their wands and stories get created.” These two views—author-in-garret and author-as-wand-waver—point to an abiding notion about writers circulated in popular culture: They are different from—and perhaps somewhat above—you and me. In addition to being magical beings not of this world, they are also fragile and incapable of dealing with the routines and stresses of daily life, so they drink, do drugs, need help, and occasionally slip into murderous madness. These traits make up four of the most prevalent representations of writers in the media, and they present a problem. After all, given these kinds of on-the-job hazards, who would ever aspire to the writing life?

Popular Portrait #1: Writers Possess Magical Gifts

This view of writers supports the idea that since writing is magical, it isn’t work. Writing just...happens. Journalists may doggedly follow leads, but they pound out articles on deadline with nary a misstep (or an editor). Authors, well dressed and carefully coiffed, appear on talk shows promoting work that is already bound and jacketed. Absent is what Stephen King calls the grunt work, which happens when authors wrestle with the page. King himself plays on the portrait of writer as magical in his depiction of Paul Sheldon, the main character in Misery. In the film version

of the book, James Caan serenely types “The End” on the last page of his manuscript and adds it to the neat stack of papers on his desk. Done—no fevered rewriting, no crossing out or starting over. His writing is effortless and over in the first few minutes of the film. The rest of the story is devoted to the extraordinary power his words have over his biggest fan. Another common depiction of writer as magical can be found in crime-solving novelists such as Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher, a gifted observer who sees details the police miss. Fletcher and her ilk do not actively write while on screen; their authoring labor is unseen, conducted in spare time not dedicated to stopping crime. These depictions perpetuate the idea that writing isn’t just easy—it’s magical work done by super-exceptional people.

Popular Portrait #2: Writers Are Recluses

The myth that writers are somehow magical and, therefore, not part of this world leads to another perception of writers: They either are not capable of handling the real world or they make the clear decision to remove themselves from it. This myth is perpetuated by the well-circulated mystiques of such reclusive literary figures as J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, and Harper Lee and is part of the lore about writing perpetuated in elementary through high-school English language arts classes. (A quick Google search brings up numerous sites with listings and articles about famed reclusive writers as well as novels and films directed at middle grades and young adult readers, such as John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and Gus Van Sant’s Finding Forrester.) Several films have traded on the notion of author-as-recluse. In the Jodie Foster vehicle Nim’s Island, based on Wendy Orr’s children’s book, a young girl writes to the author of her favorite action stories expecting that she will rescue her, only to discover that the author is agoraphobic, germaphobic, and cannot deal with the world outside her apartment. In As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson plays a writer who tries to control his obsessive-compulsiveness by devising rules for engaging with the outside world. If we broaden the portrait of writer to include publishers—the people who create the larger structures in which writers construct their works—then we can consider Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, a film about a brilliant newspaper publisher’s life-long retreat into isolation. These films represent writers as damaged or fragile people whose magical gifts allow them to share imaginative worlds with their readers even as they restrict their participation in the real world around them.

Popular Portrait #3: Writers Abuse Alcohol and Other Substances

As with the writer-as-recluse representation, the writer-as-alcoholic trope is supported by real-life examples. Among famous writers who were alcoholics are Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name just a few. Whether or not alcoholism is an occupational hazard is much contested among authors. Donald W. Goodwin has published some of the opposing views, quoting Alistair Cooke’s claim that alcohol “has no more connection with writing than with plumbing” and Michael Crichton’s observation of “how many people in ‘the arts’... are heavy drinkers, and for that matter how many do not drink at all, in that careful, somewhat embarrassed manner which indicated a drinking problem somewhere in the past.” Goodwin presents a variety of data that support the stance that writers have a higher rate of alcoholism than the general population, and writers who create representations of authors in popular culture often echo that perception. From Ray Milland’s portrayal of an alcoholic writer in Billy Wilder’s movie The Lost Weekend to Paul Giamatti’s rendition of the wine-tasting struggling writer in Alexander Payne’s movie, Sideways, writers have been depicted as masking their anxieties and fears with alcohol.

Popular Portrait #4: Writers (And Their Fans) Are Scary

Ever since Mary Shelley penned her famous first novel, in which Dr. Victor Frankenstein tells the story of his creation experiments to an eager young writer-turned-ship’s-captain, authors in fiction have been associated with suspense and horror. One of the most widely recognized and satirized examples of this representation is Stephen King’s Jack Torrance from The Shining. Snowbound in a cavernous hotel with his wife and son, struggling author Torrance slowly descends into madness, as revealed by his chilling and repetitive writings. The writer-as-madman trope is also used in Robert Altman’s film The Player, in which a studio executive is sent death threats by a rejected screenwriter. In Joel and Ethan Coen’s Barton Fink, the main character is a writer who is not so much a madman himself but is embroiled in a 1940s Hollywood that is macabre, violent, and surreal. The associations between authors and horror also extend to the depiction of fictional readers; in Misery, Stephen King creates a story in which the outcome of a fan’s devotion is violence and murder. In these representations of authors (and readers), writers inhabit frightening worlds where they are either threatened or pose threats to those around them.

So Who Are Writers, Really, and Why Does it Matter?

The four portraits discussed here are not the only iconic representations of writers circulating in popular culture, but they are among the most prevalent ones. And they present a problem. In Inkheart, Cornelia Funke writes of a character that knew all kinds of people who surrounded themselves with books but had never actually met anyone who wrote books. There are two ways to read this observation: that the character had never met an author, or the portraits of authors she carried in her head did not match the people around her who crafted narratives by putting words on paper. We take up this second reading because it points to the difficulty of accepting the iconic representations of writers popularized in novels, films, and television: They often do not depict the majority of working writers who live the day-in, day-out writing life, and they misrepresent or too easily summarize what writing practices entail.

The view that writing is effortless and done on the side by extraordinary people dismisses the real effort writers put into their work, which has multiple ramifications. For starters, it makes the hard work of writing invisible, discouraging young writers who might dismiss their own labored efforts as evidence that they just don’t have what it takes. It also devalues the products of writing, feeding into the idea that a writer’s intellectual property is unimportant and the need to pay writers for their work is unnecessary. If authors can lead the writing life in their spare time (when not solving crimes, for example), then how valuable in terms of labor can writing be? Also playing into this dynamic are the unseen others—editors, spouses, agents, assistants—who handle much of the mundane behind-the-scenes business of authoring while the writers themselves appear free to lead tweed-blazered lives penning stories in their studies. The invisibility of all that writing support undercuts the levels of labor needed to produce a manuscript ready for publication.

The psychological portraits of writers popularized in media also need to be more nuanced. There is no question that being a writer is a complex occupation and how each writer embraces that complexity depends on their own resources and outlooks; Olivia Laing offers a haunting examination of that complexity in The Trip

to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, and Jane Piirto has analyzed the work and words of women writers that show many suffer from depression and substance abuse. But through interviews with published authors, Catherine Wald examines how writers build resilience—how they handle the occupational necessity of rejection, the uncertainties of publication, the responses of friends and family. Writing can be tough work, but many writers have developed coping mechanisms and support networks aimed at making themselves healthy in ways that do not include substance abuse or agoraphobia.

The notion of the lone author living reclusively in her apartment (frequently brought into the sunlit world by a precocious child or teenager) also belies the social nature of writing. While writing does include concentrated time working alone, professional writing is never an individual endeavor. Perpetuating the myth of the reclusive author hides not only the roles of all the people who shape a book but also makes invisible the business side of authoring. Social media has made the author’s work of self-promotion more evident, but the author as public figure is not new. M. Thomas Inge noted that Truman Capote, who wrote at a time when critics valued reclusive writers, took advantage of 20th century media and his own conversational abilities to develop his persona as a writer who was both literary, social, and media savvy.

The belief that writing emerges, Athena-like, fully developed from the writer’s head minimizes both the labor involved and the expectation that writing is a skill that can be improved. Popular culture portrayals of authors are, by narrative necessity, centered on the action in the author’s life, and it is challenging to represent the labor that goes into writing; hours typing on a computer may not make for exciting storytelling. But the insidious invisibility of the work of writing perpetuates myths that damage both current and possible writers. The myth that writing is a magical process that only certain people can undertake fosters the view of writers as fragile beings incapable of handling the world in which they live. Because the hard work of writing is not portrayed often in popular media, young writers may not see writing as something they can do or as work that is economically valued. Some authors may embrace the myth and use it to their advantage, but they do so aware that they are playing a game with public expectations. The myth of the magical or monstrous writer is perpetuated.

Undoing the Myth: How Real People Live the Writing Life

It’s no easy task to undo the myths surrounding the writing life; after all, they are so persistent because they hold threads of truth (writing does require solitude; some writers do abuse drugs and alcohol and are depressive). Plus, to be frank, they make for good drama. But instead of mistaking these myths as glamorous, desirable, or inevitable, it’s important for aspiring authors to stave off cultural portraits that are unhelpful so they can imagine other kinds of writing lives for themselves. This is especially true in the digital age when the notion of being a writer is more available to a greater number of people. One possible move is to analyze common themes circulating about writers and then strategize ways to combat them. For example, fear of rejection is a common character trait in representations of writers, and talk of rejection is common in books about writing. In tandem with fear of rejection, however, is recognition that successful writers are resilient, and as Jane Piirto points out, they learn to take rejection and criticism as part of the life-long writing process.

Another possible shift is to move from seeing writers as mythical and magical to seeing writers, like most of us, as working stiffs. Author and creative writing instructor Kristine Kathryn Rusch argues that the primary problem with writing as a profession is that it isn’t seen or taught as a profession. It’s a pastime or a passion but not a career. To develop as an author, writers are often advised to workshop their manuscripts-in-progress, but these workshops can be detrimental. Frequently, the focus of peer workshops is on constant critique, leading authors into a trap of revising a single piece until they give up. Instead, Rusch advises, writers should see their work as part of a career where they improve through continued effort, ongoing practice, and frequent submissions, a self-forgiving and practical stance that undercuts portraits of writers as people obsessed about their personal failures and the imperfections of their work.

Part of understanding writing as a profession or career—or even an avocation that isn’t destructive—is to recognize the unglamorous day-to-day pace of writing. As author Anne Lamott points out, writing will have its moments when it is exhilarating. It will also have its moments when it is agonizing or flat dull. The key, she stresses, is to sit down and write, even if the words are slow to come and even if when they do come they aren’t very good. This is part of the writing life, and it isn’t fantastical, magical, and fearsome. It’s the job.

Further Reading

In addition to the examples above, for more popular media depictions of writers and authoring, see the television series Castle (American Broadcasting Company), William Joyce’s The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (book, short film, or app), or Alan Rudolph’s film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. For more about the physical and psychological conditions affecting the lives and work of writers, see Donald W. Goodwin’s Alcohol and the Writer (Andrews and McMeel), Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (Picador), and Jane Piirto’s article in Roeper Review, “Themes in the Lives of Successful Contemporary U.S. Women Creative Writers.” To read about writers and resilience, see Catherine Wald’s The Resilient Writer (Persea Books). And for more about one author’s decisions to play against the common ideas of writers, see M. Thomas Inge’s Truman Capote: Conversations (University Press of Mississippi). Writers themselves have a lot of say about the day-to-day work of authoring. For authors’ advice and views of their working lives, see Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anchor Books), Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s The Pursuit of Perfection and How It Harms Writers (WMG Publishing), and Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Pocket Books).

Keywords

workshop, writing as a profession, writing as process, writing lives

Author Bio

• Teri Holbrook, a crime fiction writer turned literacy educator, is an associate professor at Georgia State University where she examines how digital technology and arts-based research affect writing—and vice versa.
• Melanie Hundley is a professor at Vanderbilt University where she studies how teachers learn to write digital and multimodal texts. She is a passionate teacher of writing and young adult literature.