In an essay on Lit Hub, Susan Cain wonders if sadness is a necessary component of making art. “The question has long been posed by casual observers and creativity researchers alike,” Cain says. “And the data (as well as Aristotle’s intuition, per his question about the prominence of melancholics in the arts) suggest that the answer is yes.” A 1993 Johns Hopkins study found that people in creative arts professions were 8 to 10 times more likely to suffer mood disorders. In 2017, an economist named Karol Jan Borowiecki published the results of a study that compared the language in 1,400 letters written by Mozart, Liszt, and Beethoven to their creative output.
Borowiecki “traced when their letters referred to positive emotions (using words like happiness) or negative ones (words like grief ), and how these feelings related to the quantity and quality of the music they composed at the time,” Cain notes. “Borowiecki found that the artists’ negative emotions were not only correlated with but also predictive of their creative output.”
Other studies have also found that sad moods tend to make us more focused and detail oriented, improve our memories, and correct our cognitive biases.
But that’s not the whole story, Cain says. “We shouldn’t make the mistake of viewing darkness as the sole or even primary catalyst to creativity,” she writers. “Instead, it may be more useful to view creativity through the lens of bittersweetness—of grappling simultaneously with darkness and light. It’s not that pain equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.”
