Behind every great story there is a story. Behind every great writer, there is dissolution, affliction, pain, breakdown, disappointment and failure. Big minds are born of biggest failures, and without pain, nothing great happens.
Life torments artists just the way it knocks down all humans, the only distinction being that an artist rises above the challenge and fabricates it into words and images. Just as a living being is not born without the stern labour of a mother, a fine story is not born without the labour of a writer. Just the way a mother cries loud by bringing a soul into this world, a writer cries even louder to beget and nourish the story.
The pain gets lessened when there is a reason, a passionate cause, to serve. After all, a mother is happy to see her child after giving birth. Results of great pain are always striking. When ambitions are great, the stories behind are greater. There has to be a great story, great sufferings and painful remembrances, failures and tragedies that make an artistic genius. In her dairy, writer Anais Nin says, “Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
There is always a correlation between creative writing and personal failures. When life tortures great writers, when internal collisions and afflictions rise, a big question arrives: is there a point to live in a meaningless world? In his A Confession, Leo Tolstoy writes: “Had I been like a man who lives in a forest from which he knows there is no way out, I might have been able to go on living; but I was like a man lost in the forest who was terrified by the fact that he was lost, like a man who was rushing about, longing to find his way and knowing that every step was leading him into deeper confusion, and yet who could not help rushing about.”
Insoluble anxiety
For a common being, pain leads to anger and nuisance but for an artist pain is anxiety, which often remains insoluble. How do humans inculcate pain in their existence? It’s here that great art is born. A common person might punch the wall or break windows to express his anger, but an artist punches through a story to express his anger. As hunger makes you eat, thirst makes you drink and living makes you breathe, similarly pain makes a writer write. Over the years, the debate whether only the art that comes from deep pain should be taken into consideration, that the art worthy of attention comes only from a tormented artist, is discussed in unending book shelves. “Pain is a powerful drive” by which an artist creates a world made of words. Through lush metaphors and symbols, a writer expresses the deepest existential concerns — what does it mean to live or die? Where we find the authenticity of life? The bare objects such as sky, stars, water and trees are what enchants an artist to make their symbolic significance more vital.
The relationship between a writer and a reader rests on emotion; all human beings somewhere pass through difficulties and these sufferings are distributed among us all. The writer carries a deep wound, it bleeds through words. This bodily pain gets moulded into a virtual pain that is felt universally and in this way, the words act as agencies that rest on the basic phenomenal principles of human existence. War, death, sexual abuse, humiliation, social discrimination and failure in love are a few wounds that give trauma to the writer but more, the biggest trauma comes in the way of existential crises. A small wound can be stitched, though causing a great pain, but a patient who has lost hope in medicines is difficult to be treated. It’s here when authentic writing comes into being. These endless questions on the living structure of human beings give birth to psychological trauma: is there any meaning of human life? What is the function of art in this hopeless world? Is there any possibility to find truth and if yes, what is the most authentic way to reach it?
These questions, however more associated with philosophy, become more meaningful in the life of an authentic writer. The genius of art comes from those persons who experience life so deeply unlike the art that comes from cunningness. Deceptive art might have a similar structure to that of genius art, it might run through clichés, metaphors, ambiguities and ironies, but genius art is one that initiates a spark of imitation in a reader. The artistic genius engages you with thinking endlessly over things and gives you a strong emotion to feel helplessly.
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