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Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway. Troubled souls, phenomenal artists. The idea of tortured artists is a sort of a trope or stereotype that wants great artists – writers, painters, musicians – to be constantly frustrated or even self-destructing. But is suffering necessary for a fiction writer? Can “normal” people be exceptional artists?

The truth is, I don’t know. That’s also one reason I’m phrasing the title of this post as a question mark. Based on purely historical precedence, we can draw the following two conclusions regarding tortured artists:

• Not all tortured souls become exceptional artists.
• Not all exceptional artists are tortured souls.

In other words, I’d say we can’t really reach any safe conclusion regarding tortured artists. What I believe we can do – and it’s the reason this post exists – is attempt to answer the more modest question: Can “normal” people be exceptional artists?

The lessons from this attempt can be very important indeed, because they can let us see the ingredients of a great fiction writer.

Tortured Artists and Suffering Souls: Defining “Normality”

Together with words such as “love” and “success”, “normality” is notoriously difficult to define.

If we equated “normality” with “like most other people”, then we’re already in trouble, for two reasons:

• Normality is subjective, therefore we can’t compare one’s normality with another’s.
• “Like most other people” literally means average, and that puts us in a very precarious position regarding tortured artists and artistic excellence.

Therefore, for our purposes, it would be fruitful to define normality as “growing up without being disproportionately exposed to hardship”. In other words, in this context normality would mean to be raised in a more-or-less functional home, that can more-or-less provide necessities (including access to hobbies, toys, etc.), allowing one to more-or-less discover themselves and their interests as they wish.

So, can a “normal” person become an exceptional artist?

From “Normal” to Artist

Not being a tortured soul – or, in our milder version, not having suffered disproportionately – is not in itself a problem. There isn’t anything inherent in suffering that is artistically superior, that turns one into an artistic genius. However, we must also recognize one inevitable repercussion of “normality”.

“Normality” leads to unexceptional lifestyles, which are an obstacle to artistic greatness.

Those who grow up having lacked little or nothing, tend to go to colleges and universities their parents did. They tend to get similar jobs to what their parents had. They marry similar people, they have 1.8 kids (or whatever the average is in their country), a house with picket fences, an SUV, and two Labradors. The bourgeois dream becomes complete with a week off per year and a trip to Las Vegas.

There’s no room for artistry there – let alone artistic greatness.

Artists in general and writers in particular – and hey, let’s not forget they’re not quite the same – must have a need to express something. Writing isn’t something you do, it’s something you can’t help.

How can you have something to express if everything is akin to preordained by fate?

Suffering Isn’t Obligatory; Avoiding a Mediocre Lifestyle is

Look around you (or “around” you, if we can use such adverbs for the internet). Take a look at the mediocrity surrounding you on Twitter or Facebook – here’s why I left them. Look at all the hopeless regurgitation of stale concepts – “growth”, “progress”, “success”, “work”…

The overwhelming majority of people try to be special, just like everybody else. As in, literally: They try to do exactly what everyone else is doing.

They are brought up in systems that promote conformity and sameness; hard work, the good worker, the obedient child. Just look at the binary dilemmas people become entangled with, and draw your conclusions.

Or, if you want a literary example, here’s one in the words of Hidetoshi, the ghostly character of Illiterary Fiction.

The truth is, we are overrun by sameness; we have become intellectually inbred. And just like in actual evolution, it’s the random mutations that produce something unique, something that breaks the unbearable safety of being.

Artists are the mutations of our societies. Thank goodness.