Are You What You Write?

It depends. I mean, are we going to assume that people who write horror are sick bastards in real life? Or erotica writers are all sex-crazed perverts? (no offense intended) I guess it comes down to intention, themes, etc. but even then it's not easy to tell. Was the writer of Lolita really a pedophile? Did the writer of The Talented Mr. Ripley really believe in murders and getting away with them? I think one must be able to separate the person from his art, but it's not always easy.

I think it depends a lot on how the issue is treated in the writing. It is possible to write disturbing things because they are relevant to the story you're telling, the plot and the characters, but it's also true that if you are in some way troubled, you might express that in writing.

So I guess disturbing themes can indicate a troubled mind, but it's not always, or probably even often, the case that they do.

No way. At least I should hope not!

But there's a lot in my writing that is me...but I'm not everything that I write. That's where studying other people and situations help out...add to that a dash of imagination. That's me.

Ooh tricky, because, yes, you can sometimes see a disturbed mind at work in prose, but I would think that you would have to also know the person, to know for certain if the writing is typical of their mindset.

And if I am what I write, then I'd be worried. Torturers, murderers, incestuous relationships...

At the risk of oversimplifying, normal people can right about disturbing things. Disturbed people write disturbing things. I'm not sure I would always be able to tell the difference, mind you. But if I were that English teacher, and I was getting writing in which there seemed to be no distance from the disturbing content, where the identification with it seemed to be complete, and that was coupled with my personal observations of the individual, I'd probably be concerned too. Sounds like he/she was right.

Looking at this from a different angle, I would not want to write anything that could help tip disturbed people over the edge either.

Yes, I am. I'm a crazed, bi-polar, nyphomaniac serial killer.

Okay, maybe not.

One of the online news reports I read indicated that Cho's room had been searched following the killings. The article cited a note/writings by Cho including language that perhaps showed a discomfort with the morality and behaviour exhibited around him.

This raises questions.

Did he not associate with other fellow Koreans
on-or-off campus? Was he estranged from his own culture? Were his family living in the US or in Korea-what was his family relations like? You can be sure that there has been a lot of soul searching amongst his family members in Korea.

But to answer the question directly-did Cho's creative writings reflect his innate self or did they but reflect a disturbed and troubled psyche?

Let me ask another question: barring from having the ability to observe the individual in person (as in the case with Cho), how can we tell if the writer is disturbed under all those words, or he is just telling a story? Chuck Palahniuk's works are rather violent, disturbing, and graphic. But I never really get a sense that the author is a psycho.

So how can you tell? Or do we make assumptions about the author when we read?

I'm not sure I've ever read a book and thought "wow, this author must be completely crazy." It's the characters that come across as crazy.

I think there are traces of a writer in their work. How much depends on the individual. That doesn't mean I think Rowling is secretly a witch or King is a nutcase who brings the dead back to life via a graveyard for cats; it's just that the themes we might go back to can come from the fundamentals of our personalities.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to travel between worlds, stop the dead from coming back to life and go on the run after stealing £70,000 from my employer.

Our imagination does come from somewhere within us, or at least how we perceive the world. It can't be completely manufactured without our own filters and experiences. We always comment that Stephen King has a such twisted mind, even though we know he's not a psychopath himself. To me, that is power a writer can have -- to conjure something extraordinary out of the ordinary. It's when the writer can't distinguish between fantasy and reality that we should worry about...

I think it's a combination of factors. This shooter had already been removed from his classmates due to his anger. Then his writing obviously continued to be disturbing. So it's the two combined.

Once I taught two students who were obnoxious, controlling bullies in class. They wrote a story one day (obviously in consultation due to the similarities)about hijacking a plane and Killing everyone, particularly the children, in horrific ways.

I discussed it with one of the kid's mothers. She gave me the old condescending, it's only a story, stories are about freedom of expression thingy. She actually gave me, the blank eyed, you are beneath contempt look, mmmnn, wonder how she raised such a bully?

But I digress.

I reckon it's the combination that matters.
A happy person, well adjusted, sociable, considerate to other's needs to a reasonable extent, writes a gore fest, we laugh and say, "Oh, you have dark depths" and so they do, we all do.
Someone already beginning to act out their dark depths, writes a gore fest, and shows it publicly, well they're just seeing how far they can go, how much will others take of them. They're also probalygetting some depraved pleasure from writing it.

To put it another way, would you read a book about child sexual abuse written by a known paedophile. No, I wouldn't. Written by a non paedophile, possibly, depends on the quality of the writing and the message.

I'm definitely a psycho. I eat small kittens for dinner and bathe in blood.

Well, that's not really true. I write some sick things and the worst you can peg me with is that I'm lazy and I have a nasty temper--so I like to mouth off at people.

ATP said:

One of the on-line news reports I read indicated that Cho's room had been searched following the killings. The article cited a note/writings by Cho including language that perhaps showed a discomfort with the morality and behaviour exhibited around him.

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An interview with one of his professors said this was not a new thing for him. It was a consistent thing. She had read his writings, talked to him, encouraged him to get counseling. He said he would, but never did. She even went so far as to try and find a way to make it mandatory, to compel him to go, but was told by officials that they could not do that without infringing on his civil liberties.

Did he not associate with other fellow Koreans
on-or-off campus? Was he estranged from his own culture? Were his family living in the US or in Korea-what was his family relations like? You can be sure that there has been a lot of soul searching amongst his family members in Korea.

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Interviews with roommates said that no, he did not associate with anyone, Korean or otherwise. He was a loner in the extreme sense of the word. His family (immediate, at least) is here in the US, about 10 miles down the road from the school where I teach, in fact. However, they have fled their home under the inundation of the press and community anger toward their son- at least two of the victims were from his community, several more were from the school district as a whole.

But to answer the question directly-did Cho's creative writings reflect his innate self or did they but reflect a disturbed and troubled psyche?

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A bit of both, in my opinion. This was not a sudden thing (regarding his writing). It had been happening for some time. And it also wasn't a random darkness, it was in many of his works that his one professor saw.

I don't think this means that everyone who writes about dark things is a disturbed individual. I often wonder where Stephen King goes in his head to write the things he does, but in personal interviews, etc., he comes off as a soft-spoken individual. Sarcastic, witty, and there's obvious humanity there.

I've written some disturbing things, come up with ideas for even more, but I'm the kind of person who apologizes to the squirrel she just accidentally ran over, and I feel bad about it for hours. So, no, I don't think we are what we write.

To quote Stephen Donaldson: "It isn't just you. We all have Lord Foul inside us."

We all have that darkness inside us - I don't think it's healthy to pretend otherwise. I think, though, that for the vast majority of writers (and readers,) fiction provides a safe outlet for that ugliness - it's a revenge fantasy, it's not real, you get it out of your system and go on with your life. Heck, Sue Grafton, if I remember correctly,founded a wonderful literary career on a revenge fantasy about doing in her then soon-to-be ex-husband. And though I'm not going to kill her off, one character in my WIP is based on a very obnoxious secretary I had the misfortune of once working with. My female MC basically gets to make all the sarcastic little jabs that I, for the sake of making the office run smoothly, kept to myself. I wrote the character in while I was trying to deal with this woman in real life as a way of working through this one frustrating aspect of my job without being unprofessional or damaging my own reputation, and it turned out to be very therapeutic.

I guess it's a matter of being able to draw that line between fantasy and reality. To take my own mild example, I knew that telling this woman to shove it was a very bad idea - she wasn't trying to "get" me, or sabotage me or anything like that, our personalities just clashed. That's part of life, unfortunately, and being a responsible adult meant getting over it and getting on with what I needed to do. Writing this character into my story was a way of doing that. Now if I had crossed the mental line into plotting what I was going to do to her fictionally, that would have been another (unhealthy) matter altogether...

And I realize I'm rambling here... *sheepish grin*

I think it's less the subject matter and more the message. If we are "imitating life," then we have to acknowledge the negative aspects of our existence. Otherwise all the writing out there would be filled with fluffy bunnies and we'd gain nothing from reading. Bambi's Dad wouldn't have met that hunter, and Rapunzel would have had an elevator.

My husband says that in everything I write, no matter what the subject matter is, he can tell it's me. Granted, he knows it's me, so that doesn't mean much, but coupled with other people saying the same thing it does tell me that something of me is coming across there. (I'm not sure whether that's good though ) So, in conclusion, (I sound so official lol) I don't think we are everything that we write, but I do think we are a part of it... maybe it's all just word choice though .

I think the big difference is: Are you a person who can separate reality from fiction? I play video games, only certain ones, and I use that frabulous joy of blowing people's heads off as a way to get out tension. I know when that game is off, so is the feeling of solving all my problems with a BMFG. Some kids (claim) not to know the difference. They blame games for the fact that they took Daddy's handgun and blew little Bobby's head off.

If Cho had been a poet, and wrote lovely prose about flowers and the beauty of life - would the media have latched on to his writings to show a contrast between his writing and his real life actions? I don't personally think so - they look for explanations, motive, reasons.

Sometimes there simply aren't any explanations, motives or reasons.

But I digress - I believe the vast majority of us can bring evil from a deeply creative place inside us, explore it, have fun with it, and not have it take over our minds. Maybe there are a few who can't.

Person

You can tell a great deal about any writer by reading enough of his writing, if you know what to look for, and how to analyze it.

In answer to the OP: sadly, yes.

James, please don't ever read any of my stuff. You'll hate me.

I think James is onto something. It's not a matter of what we write about, but how we write it.

Writing a believable story about a pedophile does not make the writer a pedophile. Writing a story where the pedophile is the hero, no one understands him, everyone is out to get the pedophile, and everyone else is evil is probably grounds for some concern. Couple the latter with certain word choices, images, and tone, and you're really looking into someone's psyche, which can be disturbing.

/scrap wip about an misunderstood, heroic pedophile

Tish Davidson said:

This question grows out of reading the Taboos thread. How much do you think you can tell about a person from the subject matter they write about and how they handle violence, sex, and perversions of all sorts?

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I think, in some cases, you can probably tell a lot. The trick is knowing whether the content is actually a reflection of the person's problems or obsessions, and whether it's simply imagination. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes you can correlate disturbing writing with disturbing behavior--but more often, I think, you can't. Unfortunately, people seem to be prone to believe the opposite--prompting teachers, for instance, to jump to damaging conclusions when a student writes a lurid horror story.

- Victoria