Is writing fiction the tad crazy?

[Yicheng Liu]

But in the history of literature we have seen some successful authors who had mental disorders and that disorder has actually helped them to succeed. Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice in Wonderland is a good example

I would politely disagree, as I personally think he is a successful author despite being afflicted with a mental illness. Misery and illness is not the secret to good writing. Writing is hard and fundamentally challenging, and putting in tremendous effort for possibly no reward at all do sound a tad eccentric to me.

[Inkroverts]

I don't have schizophrenia, but I know everyone has crazy thoughts here and there.
Sometimes we have weird thoughts, like "I want to steal this thing" or "I want to hurt this person because I'm so angry". Before, I'd even question my own sanity and thought I was going to be a criminal.

It's more common than we think. We can't control our thoughts and feelings and fantasies sometimes, but we can choose to act on it or not. And our choices determine us.

[slj3988]

I think the majority of people feel the need to escape from reality. The reason why storytelling is so effective is because we get to relate to characters and live lives other than our own. It's a way of confronting ourselves and learning about the world without boundaries or consequence. Why do people find celebrities so relevant? Because we spend more time fixated on fictional characters they play than perhaps even people in our own lives.

[Bigwig1973]

I was working on a paper in college based on Fyodor Dostoevsky and for some reason, I used the analogy of an animal caught in a trap in my paper. I'm not a doctor nor a psychiatrist but I have heard that there are supposed to be links between intelligence and "insanity". Back to the animal in a trap and the means the animal uses to escape from the trap: the smarter they are and the more they know, the more they will try or, in some cases not try, to get out of the trap. Then there's panic which sometimes makes animals behave very stupidly. I ultimately posited that minds keep working to solve problems and even suggested that a mind normally will not even recognize something as a problem unless "it" thinks it can attain a solution. Like a computer buffering, I suppose. Now I remember! Dostoevsky was epileptic and I theorized that his epilepsy may have resulted from his feeling trapped or from his mind constantly buffering. The mind is a bit more complex, of course, than a buffering computer. In such a scenario, would writing to either reduce how many potential problems one notices or to solve problems that already exist be indictive of insanity? I don't know, but if that were the case, at least you are trying, right? Information overload causes the questions, or a genuine concern for safety causes the questions, or the amount of time between two stimuli. Like PTSD causes people to relive the problems they had because something trigged the memory. But, like I said, I'm not a psychiatrist. It does kind of fit in with the definition of schizophrenia in that it means "split mind". I probably don't understand schizophrenia, but I would say that in some cases writing to avoid more problems given certain criteria are met, or writing to solve problems, again given that certain criteria are met, doesn't necessarily point to insanity. Like trying to solve a problem but you have forgotten what the problem is.