I was all set to write an “International ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Writer’ Week” post yesterday. The post was going to be all about slow payment and how we constantly have to fight just to see our paychecks and blah blah. But then I received some bad news that someone I know who has been sick for a very long time was on his deathbed. After that, no matter how much we deserve to be paid on time like any other vendor, I no longer had the heart to write about squabbling over money.

Well, my good friend, a husband, father and fire captain who pulled off the drooping walrus mustache look where so many others had failed, passed away at 3am this morning. Of course, the stereotypically sensitive writer might be expected to brood over this, write a poem about it, or even go on a whiskey bender. But you know what? We’re not all like that. We don’t all trickle absinthe over our best friend’s graves before propping on a headstone to write a long, tortured poem with a title like “O Ye Purple Creeping Death.”  And as for the writers that are a little nuts, they often – discounting notable exceptions like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan – did their best writing in periods of sobriety, clean living and relative happiness.

Photo courtesy of Aandre Banyai via Flickr

So I thought I would address today some of the stereotypes that we writers have to deal with – the long-suffering, head-in-the-clouds, suicidal alcoholic. My friend the gentleman firefighter – may he rest in peace – was the kind of man’s man who wouldn’t mind me using the event of his death to make an important point about a misunderstood profession.

Let’s first examine the evidence in favor of the argument that all writers are lunatics.

Dylan Thomas drank himself to death at the age of 39 in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. Distraught over her failing marriage, Sylvia Plath sealed all the doors and windows and stuck her head in her gas oven. Hemingway, true to himself until the end, took the functional and utilitarian way out with a Boss & Co. shotgun. More recently, David Foster Wallace hanged himself while attempting to write the Great American Novel on the subject of boredom. Virginia Woolf filled her overcoat pocket with stones and kept walking until the water from the River Ouse closed over her head.

Can you really blame people for stereotyping writers? And those are just the deaths. Let’s move on to the drugs, alcohol and mental illness now.

Psychology professor Nancy J. Andreasen (who, interestingly, holds a Ph.D in English), conducted a 15 year study on 30 writers who came through the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop in an attempt to find a link between creativity and schizophrenia. She didn’t end up making that connection, but instead found that 30% of writers went on to become alcoholics as opposed to 7% of the control group of nonwriters. She also found that 80% of the writers – that’s 4 out of 5 – suffered from some kind of affective disorder such as bipolar. Out of the control group, only 30% suffered from affective disorders. Two out of the 30 writers committed suicide. Everybody in the nonwriter control group appears to have made it through the study without chasing a bottle of happy pills with a fifth of bourbon.

As for drugs, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s albatross was opium while William Burroughs was a heroin addict. Charles Baudelaire got low on hashish while Jack Kerouac got fast on Benzedrine. Aldous Huxley tripped the light fantastic with LSD. And we’ll just go ahead and round up and say that every famous writer ever was an alcoholic.

There was kinky sex, too, of course – I’m looking at you, Marquis de Sade – but that isn’t as well documented so I’m not going to go there. This time.

So yes, there may be some truth to the stereotype that writers have problems. But we’re not all like that. In fact, I would venture to say that the most functional of us – the ones that churn out a book every few years, keep up appearances on their author tours, refrain from blowing advances on scotch and midget hookers, and, it stands to reason, get more work – are sane, normal people. Healthy, even.

These are the working writers making a living from writing, not bull fighting like Hemingway, or piloting war planes like Roald Dahl or Antoine de Saint-Exupery. They’re sane, healthy, functional, and they live comfortably on their royalties. That sounds like a nice life.

So I suppose the question you need to ask yourself, while the clock is ticking, the drinks are pouring, and leukemia is taking good men, is what kind of writer do you want to be?

While you think about it, I’ll be down at the bar.