Where Do Authors Come From?

Where do authors come from? Writing has often been described as a form of madness. So perhaps it comes from an emotional trauma or a blow to the head in childhood. It’s certainly a mental illness but I believe it is a gentle kind of madness and comes in the form of a compulsion. I don’t think the writer has much say in it at all. I believe he can’t help himself; he has to write.

Writers are notoriously prone to extreme vanity, alcoholism, self-indulgent bouts of depression, drug use, an addiction to eccentric clothing, lack of social skills, womanizing, divorce, and extreme financial irresponsibility. Unfortunately – there are also some negative things.

You don’t wake up one morning and say ‘I think I will become an author today.’ It’s more of a gradual progression towards the desk and the typewriter. There are words and sentences and stories flying around in your head and if you don’t write them down you know you will never find peace. Eventually you surrender to the realization that you don’t have a choice and you begin writing. This is fueled by the vanity that there are people out there that will be interested in what you have to say. In most cases this is not true. I have been lucky in this regard, but I had an advantage.

I am very fortunate that people find detectives interesting. An astonishing five out of the UK’s top ten bestsellers last year were whodunits. Writing a story about a private detective is a definite advantage. Having limited choice as to my subject matter, because I strongly believe a writer should write about what he knows, I created a fictional Bangkok private detective. It was the obvious choice because that’s what I am. This process has often led me to wonder why the audience craves such characters and I have reached some conclusions.

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Tune in to The Official Prose. Blog later today for the complete article by international bestselling author Harlan Wolff at: blog.theprose.com/blog.