You might wonder what prompted the question: are all writers introverts. It’s one of the first autocomplete phrases that pop on Google, assuming that like me you also spend a lot of time searching authory stuff and random shit for your totally okay but slightly awkward interests.
The world of data tracking isn’t that surprising… but it has a way of putting you into neat little boxes. I imagine, it’s good because my writery intro-extroverted self tends to trample messily a variety of boxes in which I do not fit but that doesn’t stop me from trying.
Are All Writers Introverts – The Back Story
For once, the story didn’t start on Google. It started by the window of the living room, where I stood at the perfect angle to
- One – extract the last drop of cold oat latte coffee from the bottom of my glass
- Two – watch one of the neighbours try to shake off a door-to-door man from their front porch
- Three – not be seen by any of them
I formed a strategic plan in my mind: Operation clear the hall so it looks empty and people peering through the glass partition in the door would give up.
Tough luck, of course. I didn’t time it right. The door-to-door man rang the bell as I was rushing through the hall. I dived to the floor like a cheap rug and lay flat in the shadows.
That worked fantastically well because the dude rang again. I pretended I wasn’t there. In fact, I didn’t mind staying in that same position for the rest of the afternoon if it meant I didn’t have to talk to people.
He rang the bell a few more times and knocked at the door too, so that gave me time to think about what other writers would have done if they were me. Are all writers introverts did sound like a jolly good article idea then.
Are All Writers Introverts – A Silly Generalisation
The more I think about it, the weirder it sounds the idea that to write you have to be introverted, You truly don’t need that much to write.
In older days, pen and paper were all you needed. As far as I remember, I’ve always preferred a keyboard. Perhaps because the old days were already old enough when I was born.
Anyway, it doesn’t take much more than a few ideas and a place to let them flow. The belief that introverts make better writers because they have a wild and lively inner world seems odd. This would imply that extroverts live on the outside only and are an empty shell incapable of creativity.
So what now? Are writers introverts or are they extroverts?
The real answer is that it doesn’t matter one bit because the question is incorrect to start with.
Are Writers Introverts – Why We Want Them To Be
For some reason, there’s this image that writers are tortured souls who stay silent on the outside. There is a higher proportion of people who carry great emotional turmoils in the creative world. Not every creative suffers on the inside. A lot of them prefer to suffer openly and uncreatively for the benefit of everyone else on TikTok.
I’d argue the definition of creatives, though. I am not 100% convinced it means copying a hundread of others and turning on the camera for tears and the social media likes, recording a totally scripted fake candid moment about being a writer, well…that’s not quite what I had in mind.
I was more thinking of Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and many others, of people whose inner worlds truly match the somehow romanticised description of the tortured soul. Granted, it’s hard to talk about them without mentioning mental health. But there is more than that.
They painted an inner pain that didn’t resonate with those around them. So, the emotionally drained writer we imagine is not an introvert per se. Their inner world wasn’t relatable enough to the people who knew them. It was lost to others.
So, perhaps, wishful thinking for the future: Are all writers introverts? Are they all extroverts? It doesn’t and shouldn’t matter. The only thing you should ever wonder about is if writers are okay.
As a society as a whole, it would be nice if we could start by recognising the agonising screams of loneliness for what they are. You don’t want your writer to hope to escape from their own inner world. You want them to use that inner world to build bridges that connect us all.
If you were to ask me, I am neither introverted nor extroverted. I just prefer my neurofunky peace. I would always play dead if someone I don’t know and am not expected ring my door bell.