"A chicken and egg conundrum. Do people write because they're miserable or become miserable because they are writing? I believe that lots of people mix up the act of writing that yields a creation of a body of work with the "career" of being a writer, i.e., making money and being called a writer in public as one would be called a veteranarian or sausage maker. There is no shortage of unhappy writers. But I can't buy that people like Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Keats, Tennyson, Ginsberg, Updike, Tom Wolfe and a large host of others were unhappy because they were writing. And there is a large group of others who were unhappy or unbalanced but for reasons having nothing to do with the act of writing. Poe, Plath, Kerouac, Kesey pop into my mind. If you want to write, write for your own pleasure, your family and friends, and then maybe try to make a career out of it. Probably a better plan is to do something else as you're working on your writing. Maybe something unrelated: T.S. Elliot, the banker; Wallace Stevens, an insurance wiz; Chaucer, a diplomat of sorts. This all brings to mind the story, perhaps apocryphal, of young Bob Dylan going in search of "the poet Robert Frost" in rural Vermont (or maybe NH). Finally, a local yeoman said to Dylan, "Ohhhh, you must mean Bob Frost the farmer." To be a good writer, not a navel gazer, do lots of things. Lots of things. Then write about them. And reeeeeelaxxxxx."
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