One of the great joys of writing is that fiction thrives on misery. As someone said to me recently: "Everybody wants to be happy, but no one wants to read a happy story." Happy endings are fine; happy beginnings are perfectly acceptable, but I have yet to read a gripping story which has a happy middle. And it's a short step from unhappy stories to unhappy authors. Writers as diverse as Dickens, Hemingway, Woolf and Orwell mined their own misery for stories and ideas. The naturally sunny and well adjusted person is - generally speaking - less inclined to write obsessively, committing the seat of the pants to the chair for the necessary hours, weeks, months and years.
We live in a society which undervalues gloom. There is a noble tradition of writing which draws on melancholy for its inspiration - more or less the entire
Romantic movement, for a start. The art of staring out of the window thinking bleak thoughts and then writing some of them down is still with us. And thank God for this in society which seems to see happiness as an entitlement.
I'm writing this during
Mental Health Awareness Week. I don't want to trivialise the real suffering and debility that serious mental ill health causes, but I do believe that in setting impossible ideals for our emotional well-being, many of us are putting ourselves under undue pressure to be 'normal' and 'happy'. To me, this is the psychological equivalent of looking at anorexic adolescents in magazines and hating your own flesh. A certain degree of mental unease and anxiety is positively useful for writers. (Although too much can stop us writing altogether as Virginia Woolf knew only too well - you can sense her scribbling to keep insanity at bay in the almost manic wisdom of her notebooks.)
Even so, fiction would be much the poorer without the functioning neurotic. And speaking from experience, I know that writing fiction can help us find a sort of equilibrium even if it is only partial and temporary.
