Groups > The Writing Group (TWG)

Thanks for getting my back there. Again, our minds are not different, but how we process information is vastly different. We see things in a completely different way, which i why we write things down in the middle of the night while others don't. We see the world differently because, IMHO, we NEED to.

Hi Jon, in answer to the last question posited and without sounding too facetious about 300-400,000 dollars I,m guessing.

A writer writes. So even if a writer is not published, he or she is still a writer. Unless we're talking shopping lists.

I always thought the difference between a writer and an author was that an author was published. But now with self-publishing, everyone can be an author, even if they don't sell a single book. So what's the cutoff for being an author? When a stranger buys the book? When you actually make a living off your writing?

Jon,

Very stimulating. I believe, we as writers/authors, are each motivated in different ways. What works for one might not work for another. My motivation comes from life experience and nature. I am a FT Published Author and simply enjoy writing, of course it took me almost 5 decades to get here but I finally found what makes me, well, me.....writing!

Thank you for your thoughts, they truly are inspiring.

Donna

I really appreciate the responses to this question. I believe there is something different about people who not only write, but then expose what they write to the prying eyes of people outside their circle of friends. Exactly what that "difference" is, I'm not sure, but each of the responses seem to point at it ... being one of those who writes as I mentioned above, I suspect I meet, or possess, whatever that difference is ... but, what is it? We who write and then cast the sweat of our muse to the winds have something unique. Examine yourselves and you'll agree ... now, what is it? However we explain, as the responses demonstrate above, something unexplained somehow remains undescribed ...

I think that the writer's [poet, short story writer, essayist, memoirist, novelist academic researcher, and and nonfiction writer] mind is chemically and physiologically different from the run-of-the-mill nonwriter.

I think that the difference is biological and expresses itself in chemical and physiological modes.

Part of a shared behavior which these individuals have is that of a potentially higher than average incidences of mental disorders: bipolar [Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Paul Celan and so forth], alcoholism [Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sam Spade's creator, Norman Mailer and so forth], functional addictions {Dostovesky}, and schizophrenia (Aila Merileuto's first husband, Alexi Kivi, and so forth}.

The higher than normal incidence of these types of disorders within the writing community portends a statistical skew not a definite correlation.

Another way of looking at this is to say that because a person is a writer, it does not follow that s/he has a mental disorder.

The areas of the brain in which language is processed, could be affected by the co-occurance of the mental disorder...a shared chemical neurotransmitter, a shared physical tissue change due to the over production of the neurotransmitter?

Conjecture? I know. But the statistics beg the question.

I would agree that we who choose to be artists and writers, do see/ view things differently then others. I think we pay attention to detail, are watchers and then paint the picture we perceive or wish other to.