What happens to a writer’s creative output when he or she takes anti-depressants? It’s a myth that treatment harms creativity, according to numerous poets and other creative artists, as well as those who treat them.

Richard M. Berlin, M.D., is a psychiatrist whose book of poems, How JFK Killed My Father, won the Pearl Poetry Prize in 2002, and whose poetry appears monthly in Psychiatric Times. 

The world may not end with a bang, but with a bioweapon. A new thriller, The Ark, posits a bad guy who heads a cult and wants to end the world as we know it. His method: a highly contagious disease that was found on Noah’s Ark. The Biblical elements seem incidental to much of the action (to me, anyway). The scientists are the good guys.

The hero of this debut thriller is an engineer, much like the author himself, Boyd Morrison.

Morrison, with a Ph.D. in industrial engineering, has worked for NASA, Microsoft’s Xbox Games Group, and Thomson-RCA.  He was also a Jeopardy! Champion, as well as a professional actor. He was able to get a good agent, but The Ark was rejected by 25 publishers.  Morrison self-published it for Kindle, and then, after early online sales showed promise, secured a four-book deal from a major publisher (Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster).

Intrigued by the idea of an engineer hero, I read The Ark and tried to figure out why it works, and where it doesn’t.

Every piece of writing advice you’ve been taught could be wrong – for you.

Always think of such rules as mere suggestions, knowing that the opposite of each one may be even more worthy.

When I interviewed 76 successful novelists and poets, I discovered how silly some of the usual instructions can be.  My advice, then, is that you seriously consider avoiding the following 8 types of advice:

When novelist Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand) was asked to “help select work for short story contests, writing workshops and literary reviews,” she made the shift from a desperate seeker of signs of approval for her own writing to a “callous discarder of manuscripts.”  As she puts it:

Having spent many years putting hours of effort and creativity into my own work – sending off brown envelopes filled with still-warm pages, to various editors and judges – it is rather horrifying to discover that it takes me about a minute to know that yet another manuscript is about to be ‘binned’ as they say. In a sort of apology, I feel the least I can do is to reveal a few of the instant signs that your writing genius will not be discovered by the judges this time around!

“I assemble the dynamite but I am not ready to touch off the fuse.”

That’s a quote from Saul Bellow.  Bellow, a novelist, short story writer, and nonfiction author, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the National Medal of Arts, and the National Book Award three times (having been nominated for it six times).  I think, then, that what he thought about his own writing might interest any modern-day writer.

According to a 1948 letter by Bellow, published recently in The New Yorker (available online only to subscribers), writing “freely” was his goal. About his second novel, The Victim, he wrote:

We usually think of obsessions as negative. A lot of obsessing comes with pain, overwhelming frustration, and a sense that there’s nothing you can do about the source of your obsession.  There’s another kind of obsession, though, and those more productive obsessions are what we learn about in Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions by psychotherapist and creativity coach Eric Maisel, Ph.D., and Ann Maisel.

Writers and other artists are often desperate for fresh inspiration and renewed motivation.  By learning concrete ways to tap into the brain’s potential, Maisel’s readers can better move forward in whatever realm they care most passionately about.  What the Maisels are talking about here is another way to look at flow, or focus, or deep engagement, or mindfulness.  Even if they’re not all defined as precisely the same experience, there’s no particular need to pull apart the threads of difference.  They’re all extremely positive states of mind, ones that creative people often crave and benefit from.

Unlike many of my friends, I’ve never been a Stephen King fan. Having read several of his novels over the past decade or two, I just don’t get it. I love a good story as much as anyone. His simply disappoint me. And yet his readers are the most devoted bunch.

In a post elsewhere, I wrote that his recent novel, Under the Dome, had the word shit on nearly every page. Commenters following that post reacted as though I’d blasphemed a national hero. They clearly hadn’t read my post clearly, which tells me something about the way they read Stephen King.