P-A-S-S-I-O-N and Confidence and Publication Part 4 of 11

The darker side of passion…
A Farewell to Arms,
The Sun Also Rises
A Grief Observed,
A Brave New World
A Room of Ones Own,
The Great Gatsby

What do these famous books have in common? They are all passionate, and powerful and ultimately, after a sense tragic. Some will argue the but in this case I’m not making reference to the books. Yes, tragic, as we all know the outcome of the authors who poured passion and imagination and life into these timeless classics.
Ernest Hemingway is one of my most favorite authors and yet, his life seemed to go out of control and family and friends were unable to help him. Adolphus Huxley, died long before he should as he wasn’t even seventy, and was nearly blind. C.S. Lewis faced the loss of his wife, seventeen years his junior from cancer, and would raise her children as his own, and he would die on the same day as Huxley and John F. Kennedy, and thereby be lost to the maze of conspiracy and publicity surrounding the assassination of a president. Virginia Woolf, a talent nearly unsurpassed died in a circumstance as tragic as Hemingway. F. Scott Fitzgerald, mentor to Hemingway passed away young, at the age of 44.

I think we can all agree that these writers were beyond passionate about their work, and this might be their breaking point. Stress and passion are not a good mix. Granted some do survive and now most authors will know when enough is enough and get help, but learning to retrain that creative passion is hard.

I’m not at all suggesting one shouldn’t write, but not at the expense of health or mental well being. Being passionate is a good thing, and makes the work writers do all the stronger, it is channeling that is hard.
Yet, writers who are under stress can write better and more powerfully than others, still writers who go through the cracks are lessening. I don’t read of as many suicides or deaths of writers. or Perhaps it is found it way into the music business. Perhaps because of the stigma attached to mental illness or stress is gone. That in itself makes passion and stress something that can create a better writer and also one who can deal with the highs and lows or writing.

It is the lows that can show the darker side of passion, the lows that get to low and cause the writer to stop writing.

The highs that get to high and euphoric and make the writer feel invincible, and overly passionate, dangerously so.

There is a balance and a fine one, but one it is found and combining it with focus and confidence a writer can become great.

My Question For You Today is This: Do you think that there is a darker side to passion?