I'm Too Sane To Be A Genius Writer

I think that's my problem. It's not my lack of discipline, it's my lack of angst. Either that, or I don't take enough drugs.

This comes after I read (well, was paid to read, I have no time for leisure reading) a biography of Philip K. Dick over the weekend.

As anyone who read any of Dick's works can probably attest, Dick might have had a questionable grasp of story structure at times (he often plotted his novels using the I Ching -- no index cards for Phil), the man was a genius when it came to imagination and theme and bending his obsessions and the details of his own life into generally-fascinating sci fi stories and novels.

Dick was also neurotic as hell. He was afraid of public transportation, and even had problems eating in public. He was paranoid and depressive, which was fed by his habit (don't do this at home) of fueling his marathon writing sprees (he could churn out a novel in two weeks) by taking a lot of speed, which didn't do a lot for his mental or physical health.

At times he thought that spirits were in his head. There were even some strange unexplained incidents, such as a voice in his head telling him a diagnosis for his young son which turned out to be right, leading to immediate successful surgery on his son. He also sometimes heard Greek, which turned out to even be an ancient form of Greek.

And we hear about things like this a lot. It seems that in every film we see about artists or writers or musicians, their genius is fueled by drink, drugs or some sort of mania.

Of course, this is something of a cheat, because the only movies they make of artists' lives are about the quirky ones. The disciplined, straight-arrow painters, composers and writers? Role models, maybe, but boring.

Still, there's no denying that a little madness, being a little bit out of control, can free up your writing -- or that maybe the price one pays for real genius is having to deal with a few mental problems and some pesky substance abuse.

I don't know. I'm not going to start doing drugs now, and I'm not going to get all eccentric. And I have quirky oddball details in my past, not enough to lure Kevin Spacey to play me in the movie, but enough to vibrate my psyche a little bit (though that doesn't include my stint in Mensa, in which I felt that most of the people there were too odd for me. Yeah, I don't qualify as eccentric enough at all).

Still, one has to wonder how far suffering for your art should go.

After all, my wife used to write poetry before we were married (not professionally, but dabbling), and she doesn't any more. Because she's happier now? Probably the reason.

And even going all Phil Dick doesn't guarantee anything.

Because Dick wrote 19 mainstream, non-genre novels during his life, that never saw print. Even after "The Man In The High Castle" won the Hugo, and even after "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" was adapted into BLADE RUNNER, there wasn't a publisher who would publish any of them.