Line #98 CreatorBreakdown/Literature


1	* In Creator/JDSalinger's "The Laughing Man" (part of ''9 Stories''), a bus driver who regularly tells children a story about a Robin Hood-like character known as "The Laughing Man" goes through serious relationship problems and responds by killing off all the main characters of his story, prompting many of the children to break down and cry.
2	* Louisa May Alcott broke down while writing the sequels to ''Literature/LittleWomen'' with the death of her mother and sister and broke the FourthWall in the last paragraph of the last sequel:
3	-->''"It is a strong temptation to the weary historian to close the present tale with an [[RocksFallEveryoneDies earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth]] that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it. But as that somewhat melodramatic conclusion might shock my gentle readers, I will refrain."''
4	* Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote her famous short story ''Literature/TheYellowWallpaper'', which is the first-person account of a woman whose "[[GoMadFromTheIsolation rest cure]]" (a commonly recommended treatment of the time prescribed for women suffering from "hysteria") causes her postpartum depression to escalate into schizophrenia, around the same time Gilman underwent a nearly [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Wallpaper identical experience herself]].
5	* Creator/DouglasAdams himself admitted that he let his own mood affect the fifth ''[[Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'' book. While the fourth (''Literature/SoLongAndThanksForAllTheFish'') had been a giddily happy entry in which Adams brought back Earth and let Arthur Dent fall in love and have a lot of sex (although also containing a massive rant on the subject that this was the book he wanted to write, and if [[DearNegativeReader you didn't like that Zaphod wasn't in it, that was your problem]], and why not skip to the last chapter, where you can see Marvin die?), the fifth (''Literature/MostlyHarmless'') was a dark and morbid affair where [[spoiler:Adams destroyed Earth again, made Arthur's girlfriend disappear from the universe in a bizarre misunderstanding of the nature of space-time, devised two different realities in which Trillian is a miserable cynic, and eventually killed all the main characters in ''every possible universe'']]. Adams later regretted this book and was thinking of fixing everything in a sixth, but [[DiedDuringProduction his death prevented this]].
6	* Creator/AnneRice's ''Literature/TheVampireChronicles'':
7	** The character of Claudia the vampire child in was originally written as a response to Rice's young daughter's death from leukemia. Rice explained in an interview that didn't even realize she was doing it until someone pointed out the connection between the character and her daughter.
8	** Rice very vocally disowned the ''Vampire Chronicles'' after a (re-)conversion to Roman Catholicism. She shocked pretty much everyone with her next series of novels: ''Christ the Lord''. Yes, from the author of ''Interview With the Vampire''. That didn't hold long, and she soon went off religion again.
9	* Creator/StephenKing:
10	** He states (in ''On Writing'') that his novel ''{{Literature/Misery}}'' was the direct result of his battle with drugs and alcohol; Annie Wilkes, the killer nurse, was a metaphor for his ongoing substance abuse.
11	** King also has characters in ''Literature/TheShining'', ''Literature/TheTommyknockers'', and ''Franchise/TheDarkTower'' going through such believable agonies as alcoholics (all three) and drug addicts (the latter) that it's surprising King didn't figure out what his subconscious was trying to tell him until ''{{Literature/Misery}}'' when the protagonist is literally hobbled and kept imprisoned by a deranged fan who makes him write.
12	** He also wrote that the alien technology influencing the characters in ''The Tommyknockers'', enhancing their minds at the expense of their bodies, was another obvious metaphor he missed for his heavy cocaine use while writing the book, which made the words just flow from his typewriter even while he had Q-tips aplenty up his nose to control the bleeding.
13	** Played with by ''Literature/{{Cujo}}'', which King claims to have been so drunk during the creative process that he can't actually remember writing most of it. In ''On Writing'', he admits to finding this particularly disappointing, as he actually enjoys the book on returning to it and wishes he could remember the fun he obviously had while writing it. Though even this arguably contains an example; several chapters are told from the perspective of the "monster", the rabies-infected dog Cujo, and the narration makes it clear that Cujo [[TragicVillain doesn't want to be bad, he tries to be good]], but he's trapped in the thrall of a sickness that is taking over his brain and that he doesn't have the strength to fight against...
14	** In King's later books, his characters go through horrible accidents and suffer a long and painful recovery process, which are described in vivid detail. That might have had something to do with King having been run over by a Dodge Caravan in the summer of 1999. Which [[spoiler:he recounted in the final ''Dark Tower'' book, staging it so the characters saved his life. And one died in the process]], which King states he didn't intend to happen. It's a little confusing.
15	* The increasing cynicism and gloominess in Creator/SylviaPlath's writings were the result of her marriage to Creator/TedHughes crumbling. One of her final poems, "Edge", a creepy poem about death, [[HarsherInHindsight was dated one week before her suicide]]. Hughes, meanwhile, wrote a breakdown-induced poem of his own after hearing [[http://lovingsylvia.tumblr.com/post/1263482483/last-letter-by-ted-hughes about her suicide]].
16	* Steven Brust's ''Literature/{{Dragaera}}'' novels, especially the Vlad series, are rife with this:
17	** When the author's wife left him, we were treated to two really depressing books where the main character and his wife slowly grow apart and finally separate, after which we were treated to a really weird book where Vlad is WalkingTheEarth trying to find his place in the world.
18	** After the author's friend was killed by the RealLife mafia, the fantasy mafia the main character belongs to stopped being an amusing platform for Vlad to display his [[HeroicComedicSociopath heroic sociopathy]] and becomes a dangerous and evil organization that Vlad must escape.
19	* Creator/EdgarAllanPoe married his 13-year-old second cousin at age 26. Her death greatly affected him, and the premature death of a beautiful woman was the basis for quite a few of his stories. He even stated that it is the most poetical topic in the world. However, the trope was pretty common for his day. Poe was certainly not a very stable person.
20	* Famous Danish playwright and writer Creator/HansChristianAndersen led a depressing life. His father had died and he had to support himself and his mother; he was dyslexic; he was bisexual; he was bullied by students and teachers alike at school; he was so terrified of being BuriedAlive that he slept with a sign reading, "I only seem dead"; and his early works failed to sell. That might be why some of his literary works ("Literature/TheLittleMermaid", "Literature/TheUglyDuckling", "The Story of a Mother", "Literature/TheLittleMatchGirl", "Literature/TheSteadfastTinSoldier") are [[TrueArtIsAngsty so depressing]]. "The Little Mermaid" also parallels his bisexuality, with a character hopelessly in love with a man but totally incapable of saying it. Groovelily singled out Andersen in their song "Screwed-Up People Make Great Art".
21	* {{Averted\|trope}} by Randy Shilts in the process of penning ''Literature/AndTheBandPlayedOn'', his infamous chronicle on the history of the AIDS virus. Shilts was aware that he probably received the virus and went to his doctor for a test. But he feared that an HIV+ diagnosis would affect his then-ongoing writing process, and he asked his doctor not to notify him of the results until the book was complete. That came in 1987; and he was indeed HIV+, and died six years later (and a year after the airing of its [[Film/AndTheBandPlayedOn HBO film adaptation]]).
22	* Chuck Palahniuk's ''Literature/{{Lullaby}}'' was written to help him cope with the murder of his father and his killer's death sentence.
23	* Nathaniel Hawthorne's ''Literature/TheScarletLetter'' was composed shortly after the death of his mother, whose family had been accused of incest in much the same way as Hester was accused of adultery. Hence the slew of mother-imagery associated with Hester, especially of Hester when with [[spoiler:Dimmesdale]]. Hawthorne was also dealing with the shame of being descended from a magistrate who sentenced many alleged witches to death during the Salem Witch Trials.[[note]]He tried to disassociate himself from this magistrate by adding a "w" to his name, but Judge Hathorne lived before anything resembling standardized spelling, so some records have him with a "w" as well. So much for that.[[/note]]
24	* Creator/HPLovecraft:
25	** In general, he lived in a time when scientific advances were overturning previous worldviews and the British Empire was going into decline. This resulted in stories about [[EldritchAbomination horrors that defy our sense of reality]] and [[CosmicHorrorStory outside forces threatening a helpless humanity]].
26	** Lovecraft's mid-1920s works come from a particularly bad stint in New York in the mid-1920s, during which Lovecraft was almost destitute, he couldn't hold down a job (and his wife moved to Cleveland to find work there), and he found himself surrounded by racial minorities (not something the virulently racist Lovecraft could handle well). His work during this period is generally regarded as his weakest, particularly due to the overt and virulent racism even by Lovecraft's standards. Even Lovecraft didn't think "The Horror at Red Hook" was any good.
27	* Over time, the ''Literature/AnitaBlake'' series devolved from a noir VampireDetectiveSeries with a sarcastic, flippant, and chaste heroine to a series of bodice rippers about HotAsHell demons and, as ''Publishers Weekly'' put it, "a case to solve between wild orgies with were-animals." Writer Laurell K. Hamilton was going through a bad divorce at the time. The character Richard was based loosely on her ex-husband, and she sent the character off the rails ''hard'' (and propped up Micah as a stand-in for her new boyfriend).
28	* Creator/MaryShelley:
29	** Many literary historians consider the monster's creation scene in ''Literature/{{Frankenstein}}'' to be an allegory of childbirth. Months before writing the book, Shelley had given birth to a 2-months premature baby daughter who lived only two weeks. Victor Frankenstein's misshapen, partly-formed "monster" is created in "filth" and when first brought to life is jaundiced, as most premature newborns are. This allegory may be less obvious to us because most movie adaptations don't follow Shelley's text that closely and turn the creation of the monster into a more scientific and less earthy event than Shelley imagined.
30	** There's a theory that she may have been sexually abused by her father, which fits really well with her book ''Matilda'', in which the eponymous protagonist has an incestuous relationship with her father.
31	** ''The Last Man'' was written after she lost most or all of her friends and family. As such, it proceeds to kill them all quite literally, to the point that her narrator ends up the only person alive on the entire planet Earth.
32	* The entire career of Creator/JamesEllroy is an ongoing breakdown. The unsolved murder of his mother when he was ten launched a lifelong obsession with violent crime, particularly that of a sexual nature, which largely centered on the also unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, the infamous "Black Dahlia" case. After the death of his father seven years later, he spiraled down into a drug-addicted street thief before turning his life around by pouring his inner demons into novels. In particular, ''The Black Dahlia'' is a fictionalized version of the investigation of the Elizabeth Short murder which ends with the killer being found.
33	* Stieg Larsson's career is also an ongoing breakdown. The ''[[Literature/TheMillenniumTrilogy Girl with the Dragon Tattoo]]'' trilogy deals so much with sexual violence mostly because Larsson felt lingering guilt for failing to stop his friends from committing a gang rape when he was young.
34	* Creator/PhilipKDick:
35	** Several of his novels deal with his experiences of drug use and mental breakdown, more or less explicitly. ''Literature/{{VALIS}}'' deals with it most directly (almost autobiographically), and many of his other novels contain references to the subjects of drug use, mental instability, and the questioning of reality.
36	%% and how is that a mental breakdown informing the work? ** In ''Literature/TheManInTheHighCastle'', the author uses the ''I-Ching'' to help guide his book -- which was exactly the method Dick was using to write ''his'' book. And it shows.
37	** ''Literature/AScannerDarkly'' so closely parallels Dick's own experiences living in the drug culture of UsefulNotes/TheSixties that he ends the book by listing everyone he personally knew who died or suffered permanent damage from drug abuse. Including himself.
38	* Creator/WilliamSBurroughs' career shows how his life was basically a drug binge. Burroughs credited his writing career's existence to two specific influences. The first was him [[IJustShotMarvinInTheFace accidentally shooting and killing his wife]] in a drunken botched WilliamTelling performance (he was charged with murder and spent a few days in a Mexican prison until his affluent family bailed him out). The second was Creator/JackKerouac's constant nagging. One work of Burroughs' that stands out is ''Literature/NakedLunch'', allegedly written during a drug binge and dealing heavily with drug use and homosexuality (which Burroughs was ''also'' familiar with).
39	* Will Elliott, the author of ''The Pilo Family Circus'', is a sufferer of schizophrenia. So he wrote a story about a circus built within a pocket dimension, managed by two feuding mutant brothers in the pay of a race of godlike reptiles that consider humans to be little more than a delicacy and were [[SealedEvilInACan imprisoned beneath the circus by unknown forces]]. And the Circus's latest inhabitant is a young member of the [[MonsterClown Clown Division]], who is steadily losing a fight for [[SplitPersonalityTakeover control over his own body.]] DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything?
40	* Nosaka Akiyuki wrote ''Anime/GraveOfTheFireflies'' out of guilt that he was unable to save his younger sister from malnutrition during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. His alter-ego Seita dies in September 1945 as a vagrant teen in a subway.
41	* Similar to Nosaka Akiyuki, Creator/TakashiYanase suffered a severe case of PTSD after World War II ended. To cope with this, he became a children's book author and illustrator with a majority of his works having a melancholy tone that deals with depression and sadness [[WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids despite aimed at children]]. While ''Anime/TheKindlyLion'' and ''Literature/TheRoseFlowerAndJoe'' carried a melancholy tone. However, his most personal work is ''Chirin no Suzu'' (known as ''Literature/RingingBell''), [[VeryLooselyBasedOnATrueStory which is loosely based on his experiences in WWII]]. The story is an allegory for the effects of war and the negative side effects for innocent victims (mainly children who lost parents during the war). The story has since become very beloved with Japanese audiences and was adapted into a feature film by Creator/{{Sanrio}} in Spring 1978.
42	* Creator/TadWilliams went through a painful divorce during the writing of the third novel of ''Literature/MemorySorrowAndThorn'', and he noted in his commentary that he was concerned about it affecting the mood of the story. In a possible aversion, he decided to go with a [[EarnYourHappyEnding semi-happy]] ending rather than the version he had been contemplating.
43	* Creator/TerryPratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease, and it started to affect his work greatly:
44	** His first book after the diagnosis was ''Literature/{{Nation}}'', a book about losing faith and salvaging life in the aftermath of [[AfterTheEnd a horrible disaster]]. It's still got ''some'' of the humour that made ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' famous, but there's a lot in the book that isn't funny at all.
45	** Several of Pratchett's ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'' characters began to show signs of aging: memory lapses, decreased physical endurance, and exhaustion. The characters are still going, but mostly on sheer willpower, and they know it will run out eventually. It's most obvious in ''Literature/{{Snuff}}'', in which Sam Vimes' old antagonist Lord Rust, once virile and extremely proud, is now old, worn out, and confined to a wheelchair; Vimes and Rust are actually civil to each other (for the first time ever), and Rust even concedes that Vimes is a man of great honour and integrity, something that would have been unthinkable before. It not only shows the characters aging but also essentially getting the story's affairs in order.
46	** In the short story "Final Reward", the protagonist is a writer of a LongRunner book series, but after an argument with his girlfriend, he decides to kill off the series' protagonist, Erdan the Barbarian. Unfortunately for him, Erdan comes to the writer's house, and HilarityEnsues.
47	* In the 1st century BCE (making this OlderThanFeudalism), Roman poet Catullus began his career writing love poems to his girlfriend "[[HaveAGayOldTime Lesbia]]". Then she left him for another man, and his poems suddenly shifted in tone to "Lesbia is a slut." Some scholars have theorised that Lesbia was a married woman having an affair with Catullus. Others have theorised that "Catullus" is actually a group of like-minded poets, all of whom had something like this happen to them, making it a Creator Group Breakdown. Lesbia herself is usually associated with Clodia, the sister of the Late Republican politician Publis Clodius Pulcher (with whom she is sometimes accused of having an incestuous affair).
48	* Creator/ThomasHardy wrote increasingly fatalistic novels, to the point that the last two (''Literature/TessOfTheDUrbervilles'' and ''Jude the Obscure'') thoroughly burned him out; combined with the scandalous response the novels provoked in the country at large, it was enough to cause him to quit writing novels for the remaining 28 years of his life, turning his hand to plays and poetry instead.
49	* Creator/LarryNiven explored the pain and difficulty of being a two-pack-a-day smoker by giving several of his characters breathing problems, allergies, and so on.
50	* Creator/LurleneMcDaniel started writing books about dying children as a way of coping with the pain of her child's diabetes. That was in 1985 and she's still at it, so it doesn't seem to be working.
51	* Creator/ArthurConanDoyle sank into a depression after the culmination of the deaths of his wife Louisa, his son Kingsley, his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law[[note]]one of whom was E.W. Hornung, the creator of the literary character Literature/{{Raffles}}[[/note]], and his two nephews. He found solace in Spiritualism, which posited alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave. He wrote ''The Land of Mist'', a novel-length tract justifying his conversion, and had his ultra-rationalist character Literature/ProfessorChallenger convert as well. Doyle wound up having a serious falling out with Creator/HarryHoudini, who was on a skeptic's crusade to expose charlatans who claimed to demonstrate such phenomena; he wound up convinced that Houdini ''himself'' had those abilities. There's also a suggestion in chapter 2 of ''The Land of Mist'' that the deaths of "ten million young men" in UsefulNotes/WorldWarI was punishment by the Central Intelligence for humanity's dismissal of the alleged evidence for life after death.
52	* In the last fifteen years of his life, Creator/MarkTwain became increasingly embittered due to the loss of his writing fortune through bad investments and the deaths of two of his daughters and his wife. Consequentially, his works became increasingly bleak and misanthropic, culminating with ''Literature/TheMysteriousStranger''. Twain also lost faith in organized religion, and in people's expectations of it, but not in God Himself -- his last published work, ''Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'', while mocking these aspects, showed a generally truly benevolent version of Heaven.
53	* Creator/LewisCarroll:
54	** Allegedly, ''Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There'' emerged after Carroll came out of a massive depression following the death of his father. Not many people know that the sudden disappearance of Carroll from his usual habitat was because he had shut himself off into his home. His reputedly accurate and meticulous diaries contain no reference to this particular period; what is known is that he came out of the depression with the story fully written. Note that it is heavier than the original ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' and is plagued with a general feeling and expression of futility.
55	** He suffered another breakdown with ''Sylvie and Bruno Concluded'' following the death of Creator/AlfredLordTennyson. He even mentions the loss of "the great poet laureate" in the preface of the book.
56	* ''Coplas por la Muerte de mi Padre'', by medieval Spanish author Jorge Manrique, consists of more than twenty poems written after Manrique's father's death. It appeals to Christian resignation and understanding of death, and many parts are dedicated to explaining what a great man his father was and why he certainly is in Heaven. However, it also contemplates the futility of life. It is considered his masterpiece, and an example of the best in Spanish poetry of his time.
57	%%So what happened to the _author_ here? * Could be a contributing factor in the fact that Charlaine Harris' most recent entry in the [[Literature/TheSookieStackhouseMysteries Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire series]] has her literally [[spoiler:killing off almost half her regular cast. Rest assured, though, the whiny computer nerd Bill and LoveableRogue Eric are still around.]]
58	* Creator/TSEliot started writing ''Literature/TheWasteLand'' while recovering from a nervous breakdown in Switzerland.
59	* At first, Cornelia Funke, author of ''Literature/TheInkworldTrilogy'', was planning to name the third book "Inkdeath" (for reasons associated with the plot), but she soon changed her mind and decided to name it "Inkdawn" instead. However, she later changed her mind again, and the book's official name turned out to be "Inkdeath" after all. This and [[spoiler:the trilogy's tragic ending, despite earlier promises that all ends well]] can easily be explained if one takes into consideration that Funke's husband, Rolf -- also the inspiration for the character Dustfinger -- died of cancer in 2006, after the publication of the second volume ''Inkspell'' but before ''Inkdeath'' was released. (This is strongly suggested in the third book's dedications, most of which mention "dark days" and/or Rolf's death.)
60	%%* Charles Bukowski made a career out of this.
61	* In her last completed novel, ''Literature/WeHaveAlwaysLivedInTheCastle,'' Creator/ShirleyJackson penned two of the most convincing characters in all her books: two sisters, Constance and Merrikat, one a recluse, the other a fiery warrior against a world that is hostile to them. Jackson believed these two characters to be reflective of her own warring personality, and after completing the novel, she had a breakdown resulting in herself becoming an agoraphobic recluse until her death a few years later.
62	* You'd be hard-pressed to find a full-length novel by Creator/RoaldDahl that doesn't contain some element from his childhood. Reading his autobiography ''Boy'' turns most of his children's novels into romans à clef. Analogues to the Matron and Captain Hardcastle, and situations of being accused of cheating and corporal punishment, recur in his fiction, showing that he never quite got over those traumatic experiences. The books also have elements of WishFulfillment: in ''Danny, the Champion of the World'', Danny has a father who reacts with protective rage when he finds out that Danny has suffered corporal punishment (from a Captain Hardcastle avatar), and Matilda develops magic powers and manages to best the evil authority figure. Then again, Dahl was also profoundly marked by very good things -- he spun a whole magic candy factory out of one tiny sweetshop (although the owner was horrible and the cause of his first caning).
63	* One could argue that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's beloved ''Literature/TheLittlePrince'' was affected by his turbulent relationship with his wife Consuelo -- she is the rose.
64	* Charlotte Bronte:
65	** ''Literature/{{Villette}}'', which followed the death of her sisters Emily and Anne and her brother Branwell, is much moodier and more pessimistic than her most popular work ''Literature/JaneEyre''.
66	* ''Shirley'' was written during the illnesses and deaths of her sisters. Initially, it is thought she meant to kill off the heroine, but due to her grief, she couldn't. It also explains why the plot suddenly becomes inconsistent and less coherent. In the novel, the heroine discovers her friend's governess is actually her long-lost mother, and her cousin is her friend's cousin's tutor. This could be a desire to possess close relations.
67	* Creator/GeorgeRRMartin:
68	** After his best friend ran off with his girlfriend, he wrote a number of stories with this theme. One of his stories written during this time, ''Meathouse Man'', about brainless humans being used for sex, even ends on the line that love is the cruelest lie anyone can be told.
69	** He claims that he experienced this when writing the infamous "Red Wedding" of ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire''. He actually felt such empathy even for the minor characters being killed off that he skipped the chapter, only returning to finish it after he'd written everything else.
70	* Referenced InUniverse in Lindsey Davis' ''[[Literature/MarcusDidiusFalco Ode to a Banker]]''. Constrictus, the epic poet, has a serious problem: his girlfriend won't dump him. How is a man supposed to produce moving romantic poetry, if his muse refuses to rip out his heart and stomp on it?
71	* ''[[Literature/AnneOfGreenGables Anne of Ingleside]]'' is noticeably more depressing than the rest of the books in the ''Anne'' series -- set pre-World War I, but written post-World War I, about children whose lives will be defined (and ended) by the Great War, when the second one was already starting, making it all look especially futile. It was also the last book L.M. Montgomery completed before her death, which many believe to have been a suicide.
72	* While Creator/BretEastonEllis has admitted that his works are sourced from this trope by default, he admitted only recently that ''Literature/AmericanPsycho'' was never written with the "yuppie serial killer on Wall Street" high concept nor was intentional social criticism. It was sourced from what he described as "my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself."
73	* ''Harmony'' by Project Itoh is a story about medicine becoming the most basic human right, leading to Japan becoming a dystopia with constant monitoring of physical and mental health via {{Nanomachines}}. Over the course of the book, the main character realizes that human consciousness is just a side effect of chemical impulses in the brain and is no longer necessary in society, and helps accomplish the villains' AssimilationPlot by doing nothing to stop them from destroying human consciousness (a process compared to "going to Heaven"). He wrote it while dying from cancer and edited it in the hospital in the final stages of his illness.
74	* The story goes that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote ''Literature/TheStrangeCaseOfDrJekyllAndMrHyde'' after [[BasedOnADream a particularly vivid nightmare]] that he experienced. Even if this story isn't true, however, then its themes of a man's character switching between extremes essentially due to a gradually worsening drug addiction probably rang true with the author, since he battled an addiction to various drugs administered to him due to his poor health his whole life.
75	* Donaya Haymond wrote the ''Literature/LegendsOfLaconia'' series during her adolescence, and the third novel, ''Waking Echoes'', during her first year of being diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and coming to terms with it. It is noticeably darker than the previous ones.
76	* Evelyn Waugh's ''Vile Bodies'' begins as a light comedy about young socialites and ends with a bleak depiction of the outbreak of war. The author attributed this to the failure of his marriage during the writing process.
77	* Creator/JKRowling:
78	** Rowling suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts while writing ''Literature/HarryPotter'', resulting in the Dementors, Harry's parental figures dying, and Luna's FriendlessBackground. She even revealed that, due to this depression, she genuinely considered killing off Ron "out of sheer spite". Even though she knew "in her heart of hearts" that she wouldn't actually do it, it just goes to show the sort of mood she was in to even consider it. She was so inclined to kill off the parental figures that she had to stop herself from killing off Arthur Weasley in ''[[Literature/HarryPotterAndTheOrderOfThePhoenix Order of the Phoenix]]'' once she realised that Arthur was the only positive ''living'' father figure in the series (but she "made up" for it by offing newborn Teddy's parents Lupin and Tonks in ''[[Literature/HarryPotterAndTheDeathlyHallows Deathly Hallows]]''). But the biggest change is the deaths of Harry's parents; originally, they really ''were'' killed in a car accident for [[ConvenientlyAnOrphan convenience's sake]], but Rowling's mother passed away before she could tell her about the project, and Harry's parents' death transformed into a powerful magical HeroicSacrifice.
79	** Following Rowling's vocal opposition to self-identification for trans people, two subsequent ''[[Literature/CormoranStrikeNovels Cormoran Strike]]'' novels contained elements widely believed to be linked to the online backlash her statements provoked. A subplot in ''Troubled Blood'' involves a male serial killer dressing as a woman in order to more easily murder women. Strike is also forced to move house at the end of the book, due to the media's interest in his life. In the other book, ''The Ink-Black Heart'', the victim is an online content creator who's subjected to online harassment after making comments that were interpreted as racist, ableist and transphobic.
80	* Originally, ''Literature/DeadSouls'' was supposed to have three parts (like Dante's ''Literature/TheDivineComedy'', standing for Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise respectively). But then Gogol went through a religious crisis, mixed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he destroyed the third book and parts of the second. Until his death, he wouldn't restore them. He also stated that he felt that VillainProtagonist Chichikov and other characters couldn't be redeemed.
81	* InUniverse in ''Literature/WillGraysonWillGrayson'': Tiny puts a song involving all of his ex-boyfriends in the musical he writes and puts on.
82	* Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his poem ''Christmas Bells'' (which was later put to music and became the song "I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day") shortly after his wife had died in a freak accident ''and'' his son had been seriously wounded while serving in UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar. It really puts the third verse in context and also makes the fourth verse more meaningful and powerful.
83	* {{Inverted\|Trope}} by Creator/ArthurMachen: After his wife died, he went through a great deal of personal turmoil and soul-searching, which resulted in a conversion to Christianity at the turn of the century[[note]]although he'd already been part of the Anglican church for his whole life[[/note]], which in turn led to him using his newfound sense of inner peace to write two unusually happy and upbeat novels, ''The Great Return'' and ''The Secret Glory''.
84	* ''Girlfriend in a Coma'', in which the title character and her friends are the sole survivors of a global catastrophe, came about while Creator/DouglasCoupland was going through a depressive phase, which he described later as "one of the darkest periods of my life". He also stated that this novel was the last "written as a young person, the last constructed from notebooks full of intricate observations."
85	* Creator/GeorgeOrwell attributed the utterly bleak atmosphere of ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' to the misery he experienced as a result of tuberculosis.
86	* The fate of Nigel in Sue Townsend's Literature/AdrianMole series (blind, cranky, and reclusive) reflects Townsend's own health issues and blindness. Many of her characters have health breakdowns in the later books.
87	* Creator/MatthewReilly's wife died at age 37, after which he spent months completely absent from the Internet, and only leaving the house to walk his dog. The next book he released after this is his first in which the villain gets away at the end.
88	* Creator/MarianKeyes is a well-known ChickLit author who suffered a nearly three-year bout of severe depression after her book ''The Brightest Star in the Sky'' was published. She eventually recovered with the help of learning how to bake and incorporated her life-long struggle with depression into her novel ''The Mystery of Mercy Close''.
89	* Used InUniverse in ''Literature/NeroWolfe'' novel ''The League of Frightened Men'': The murder suspect is an author who bears a long-standing grudge against many of his friends and has written several novels in which thinly veiled versions of them meet incredibly violent ends. When several of them die or disappear, this convinces his friends that he is somehow orchestrating their murders. [[spoiler:Wolfe, however, realises that the author, although violently hateful, is incapable of murder and so writes about the ways in which he'd like to kill his friends in order to play head games with them, meaning that it's just this trope after all]].
90	* Creator/FrigyesKarinthy's obscure and borderline-misogynistic satirical novel ''Capillaria'' (in which giant sex-crazed women torment and devour a race of phallus-shaped dwarves) was written during Karinthy's second marriage. It was not a very happy marriage.
91	* Creator/ThomasLigotti's entire writing career is fueled by a lifelong affliction with chronic anxiety, agoraphobia, bouts of outright psychosis due to adolescence usage of [[DrugsAreBad LSD]], and clinically diagnosed anhedonia, culminating in the anti-procreation AuthorTract ''The Conspiracy Against the Human Race''.
92	* Creator/JohannWolfgangVonGoethe launched his career with ''Literature/TheSorrowsOfYoungWerther''. A somewhat autobiographical work, it came to him after an unhappy meeting with Charlotte Buff, who was to marry a man named Johann Kestner.
93	* According to Website/TheOtherWiki, Creator/RobertMunsch wrote his book ''Literature/LoveYouForever'' after he and his wife had given birth to two stillborn babies.
94	* Throughout most of the latter part of his life, Creator/IanFleming was a heavy smoker and an alcoholic; at his height, he was managing seventy cigarettes and at least a bottle of spirits a day. His health began to decline greatly by 1960, and his protagonist Franchise/JamesBond started to suffer, too -- he shared his creator's love of smoking and drinking, but the once perfectly strong and healthy (although occasionally hungover) spy started to decline. ''Literature/{{Thunderball}}'' (1961) opens with Bond failing a medical (a thinly veiled copy of Fleming's own) and being sent to a health farm (which Fleming's doctor ordered him to do). Bond's line to Moneypenny, "I would rather die of drink than of thirst," was reputedly a favourite line of Fleming's to anyone who told him to stop drinking. By ''Literature/OnHerMajestysSecretService'' (1963), Bond admits to Tracy that where she [[INeedAFreakingDrink needs a drink]], he needs ''three'', and also confesses to having tried and failed to quit his incredible cigarette habit -- friends called this a fair self-reflection by Fleming. And by ''Literature/YouOnlyLiveTwice'' (1964), the last book to be released in Fleming's lifetime, Bond is a depressed, drunken shadow of a man [[spoiler:due to Tracy's death]].
95	* A minor version of this helped to shape the final book in Lois Lowry's Literature/TheGiverQuartet. Her initial plan was that the final book would be about Gabriel, a minor but crucial character in the original ''The Giver'', searching for his mother. However, several years earlier, Lowry had lost her own son (whose stories had been the inspiration for ''The Giver''), and she found that in her lingering grief, she was empathizing with and feeling more attuned to the mother than to Gabriel himself. She decided to run with it and reimagined the story with Gabriel's mother as the protagonist and Gabriel as a major supporting character. In an illustration of how Administrivia/TropesAreNotBad, the finished product, ''Literature/{{Son}}'', ended up being a strong finish to the quartet.
96	* Yomi Hirasaka became more and more [[ArtistDisillusionment disillusioned]] as ''Literature/{{Haganai}}'' dragged on, as he started to feel like it was a chore to write but [[ExecutiveMeddling he was forced to keep it going by his publisher because of its popularity]]. As such, he began to deliberately write the characters to make as [[ConflictBall stupid and melodramatic decisions as humanly possible]] in order to drive the fans away and force the novels to get canned. After he was finally allowed to end the series after 11 volumes (and made it clear he would never work for Media Factory and Kadokawa again), his next novel series ''Literature/ASistersAllYouNeed'' took several [[TakeThat pointed shots]] at the light novel industry.
97	* Main/InUniverse in the first book of ''Literature/DiaryOfAWimpyKid''. Greg Heffley and Rowley Jefferson apply to be the authors of a new comic strip series after "Wacky Dawg" was discontinued by the board due to the author using the series to vent about his personal problems. Their series Zoo Wee Mama would itself also lead to a creator breakdown after it became an in-universe meme. This is one of the major factors into [[spoiler:Greg and Rowley ending their friendship for a while]].
98	* The 2016 children's picture book ''Literature/OlliesOdyssey'' by Creator/WilliamJoyce has a very melancholy tone with [[CentralTheme death and the loss of a loved one as a major theme]]. This is due to the author still grieving over the loss of his daughter Mary Katherine Joyce, [[RealitySubtext who passed away from a brain tumor in 2010 at age 18.]] The 2022 Creator/{{Netflix}} [[Series/LostOllie adaptation]] emphasizes more on the grieving process, such as Ollie alongside Billy and his father coping with [[NoNameGiven Billy's mother's cancer diagnoses]] ([[TheDiseaseThatShallNotBeNamed which is unnamed]]), her passing, and the aftermath.

Context CreatorBreakdown / Literature