The Perils of Monomania
When your whole identity is wrapped up in your art, your art doesn’t blossom; it withers.
Writer Benjamin Nugent, in a 2013 essay for The New York Times, described how he had what seemed like an idyllic writer’s life in graduate school.
No wi-fi. No diversions. Lots of snow. It was like he was a writer from another time.
But he found something surprising.
His complete devotion to his writing at the sacrifice of all other diversions actually poisoned his writing.
“When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth,” Nugent wrote. “For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well.”
Nugent could no longer read his own writing critically. If your writing is your whole existence, you are by definition inside of it. You have no distance.
“I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad,” Nugent continued, “because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane. I lost the ability to cheerfully interrogate how much I liked what I had written, to see what was actually on the page rather than what I wanted to see or what I feared to see.”
His seminar mates in school started to lose interest in his work. “I could see everyone struggling to care.”
So he worked harder. “First my writing became overthought, and then it went rank with the odor of desperation. It got to the point that every chapter, short story, every essay was trash.”
Nugent was in the grip of monomania. His whole identity was engulfed in his work, his art.
It was only when he developed some diversions that his writing showed renewed signs of life. He fell in love. He played in a cover band. He got access to wi-fi.
“One morning, after I diversified my mania, my writing no longer stank of decay. Eventually, it sat up and took food”
Here at the end of 2024, as you hear messages of goals, productivity, and hyper-achievement, remember to modulate the distance between you and your art.
Like breathing in and breathing out, make creating a part of a larger system of your life and identity.