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Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles while writing Das Kapital
And Gauguin, he buggered off, man, and he went all tropical
And Philip Larkin, he stuck it out in a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas, he died drunk in St. Vincent's Hospital.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, "There She Goes, My Beautiful World"
Sometimes you just have a bad day.
The people who tell stories are just like anyone else. The difference, though, is that if something in their life goes all wahoonie-shaped, they have someone to take it out on -- the fictional characters that inhabit their created worlds. Thus, you occasionally end up with a story taking a sharp left turn into the author's psyche. Characters can die left and right, the teenaged hero's schoolteacher will be a sadistic tormentor, and no one's love life has any chance of turning out well.
Note that this doesn't necessarily make it bad; some shows have achieved their highest ratings in the middle of a bout of Creator Breakdown. However, look out for the Writer On Board.
Of course, it's hard to tell when Creator Breakdown is happening, and when it's a case of Genre Shift for some artistic reason; you shouldn't put an example here unless you have it from the mouth of the creator themselves. That said...
Examples:
Anime/Manga
- Probably the most famous instance of this is Hideaki Anno and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The latter half of that show and the subsequent movies are a testament to his depression and conflict with the otaku lifestyle at the time; in the end, all of that eventually merged with Gainax's serious financial difficulties to create the infamous, dark and Mind Screwing last two episodes.
- Which is ironic because the first half of the show was created off of the depression, but the latter half was made while he was in therapy.
- FLCL was then reportedly created by Kazuya Tsurumaki as a vacation for the staff afterwards -- Anno's only contribution to the series was providing the voice of a non-anthropomorphic cat.
- The other (in)famous example is Yoshiyuki Tomino. Reportedly, the famed director struggled with depression for decades, and this was expressed by the high body count of many of the series he directed, such as Space Runaway Ideon, Aura Battler Dunbine, Zeta Gundam, and the twisted Victory Gundam. Not surprisingly, this earned Tomino the nickname "Kill Em All". In his defense; however, he likes to do what he can to insure that his series will not have a sequel.
- A couple of years before Bleach, its author Kubo Tite had another series titled "Zombie Powder", which only lasted four volumes. The series was cancelled because of its low popularity, but it was implied that a nervous breakdown the author had also influenced in the decision (the fact that the manga was left with an abrupt end may be a clue). Kubo himself acknowledged it, in a veiled manner, in the flaps on the last volume published.
- Go Nagai freely admits that he gave Devilman Lady a depressing ending (nowhere near as bad as the original Devilman, although that was intentional) as revenge against his fanbase for preferring Mazinger Z to Devilman, which he saw as his Magnum Opus.
- Fictional example: In Princess Tutu, Drosselmeyer traps the entire town of Kinkan in a story after the villagers began to fear his story-turning-into-reality powers and cut off his hands. That story? Written with HIS OWN BLOOD from the stumps of his arms where his hands were cut off. Which, of course, explains why the man is so insane and obsessed with tragedy.
Literature
- Douglas Adams himself admitted that he let his own mood affect the fifth Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book. While the fourth (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish) 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, the fifth (Mostly Harmless) was a dark and morbid affair where 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. Adams later regretted this book and was thinking of fixing everything in a sixth, but his death prevented this.
- On the other hand, Adams has also acknowledged he was depressed while writing So Long and Thanks, which featured very little of the other regular characters, or the typical Hitchhiker's style, and included a moment where Adams tells any readers who would rather see Marvin than Arthur's love story that they can just skip to the last chapter (in which the paranoid android dies, though with a good sendoff). While Mostly Harmless may be more of a downer in the long run, it could be argued that it also feels more like a Hitchhiker's novel.
- Some years later when the later books in the series were adapted for radio, the end of Mostly Harmless was changed to a more upbeat, though still Adams-esque, conclusion.
- In fact, Adams had these a lot; one episode of the radio series was written while he was very annoyed about the number of shoe shops in Oxford Street and the impossibility of finding a pair he liked in any of them. The episode is largely about the economic concept of the Shoe Event Horizon, beyond which it becomes impossible for any aspiring businessman to open a shop that sells anything other than ill-fitting shoes, causing the collapse of a planet's entire economy. A much shorter version of the rant appeared in the novel The Restaurant At The End of the Universe; the Corrupt Corporate Executive Hig Hurtenflurst, who represents a thinly disguised version of the British Shoe Corporation, does not.
- The character of Claudia the vampire child in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles was originally written as a response to Rice's young daughter's death from leukemia.
- 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 a Vampire.
- Stephen King states (in On Writing) that his novel 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.
- King also has characters in The Shining, The Tommyknockers, and The Dark Tower going through such believable agonies as alcoholics (all three) and drug addicts (the latter) that this troper is still amazed that King didn't figure out what his subconscious was trying to tell him until Misery.
- In King's later books, his characters have gone through horrible accidents and have suffered a long and painful recovery process, which are described in vivid detail. Might have had something to do with Stephen King having been run over by a Dodge Caravan in the summer of 1999. Which 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.
- Gulliver's change from a cheery optimist to a cynical misanthrope at the end of Gullivers Travels is said to be reflective of Jonathan Swift's increasing mental instability.
- J.K. Rowling has admitted that Professor Severus Snape, the bullying teacher of Harry Potter, was based on a much-disliked teacher from her own childhood.
- Also, quite a bit of her Kill Em All mentality latter in the series, particularly towards parents, seems to derive from the death of her mother while she was just writing the first book.
- Steven Brust's Dragaera novels, especially the Vlad series, are rife with this.
- What happens when the author's wife leaves him? We get treated to two really depressing books where the main character and his wife slowly grow apart and finally separate, after which we get treated to a really weird book where Vlad is Walking The Earth trying to find his place in the world.
- How about when the author's friend gets killed by the Real Life mafia? Suddenly, the fantasy mafia the main character belongs to stops being an amusing platform for Vlad to display his Heroic Sociopathy, and becomes a dangerous and evil organization that Vlad must get out of.
- Edgar Allan Poe thought the best theme to write about was the premature death of a beautiful woman. He married his 13-year-old-second-cousin at age 26. Her death was the basis for The Raven and Annabelle Lee (and Ligeia, and probably The Fall of the House of Usher, and a dozen more stories). He was also suicidal (possibly bipolar), an opium addict and an alcoholic, possibly explaining his obsession with madness and death. He also used hallucinogenic mushrooms and absinthe. He became a respected and very successful author yet died in poverty of what was long believed to be alcohol poisoning (recent analysis has identified rabies as a more likely culprit). But at least it meant plenty of thoroughly creepy, spine-tingling horror stories for us.
- Poe's Wife actually died of TB, as well as his mother and stepmother.
- Famous Danish playwright and writer Hans Christian Andersen led a depressing life (father dead, having to support himself and his mother, bullied by teachers and students alike in school, being dyslexic, his early works failing to sell...), and that's likely the reason why some of his literary works (The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Story of a Mother, The Little Match Girl, The Steadfast Tin Soldier...) are so, so depressing.
- Bram Stoker. This civil-servant-turned-horror-novelist was obsessed with dualities; Dracula contains themes of good vs. evil, beauty vs. ugliness, east vs. west, old vs. young, and technology vs. mysticism. This seems inconsequential until you learn that his first book was The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, published 1879, and that his night-life of boozing and whoring reputedly killed him through syphilis, although this is unconfirmed. See also The Lair of the White Worm for his obsession with pairing beauty with ugliness and other opposites.
- Averted in Wilkie Collin's The Moonstone (one of the first true detective mysteries, and the one from which Sherlock Holmes picked up its tricks), where the funniest and most biting satire of the 800-page novel was composed from his bed while he was suffering from a painful illness, and after his mother had just died.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was composed shortly after the death of his mother - his mother, whose family had been accused in 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 Dimmesdale.
- H.P. Lovecraft didn't so much have an author breakdown than he had had the breakdown before he even started writing. In fact, the song "Twitch" summons it up very nicely.
- Narnia film director Andrew Adamson believes how C.S. Lewis' opinion of women improved after his marriage to Joy Davidman-Gresham can be seen in his altered portrayal of female characters. Jill's character, for one, underwent a drastic change between The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, and there was the introduction of Aravis.
- Phillip Pullman. [[X Just X Just...Phillip Pullman.]
Live Action TV
- The Friends episode that featured Phoebe thinking her mother has come back to her in cat form was penned by a writer whose own mother had recently died. Other staff writers have said that the script -- which earned primarily negative responses from the audience -- would not normally have been greenlit, but under the circumstances nobody felt comfortable saying 'no.'
- By her own admission, much of the widely-disliked Season 6 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a rehashing of writer Marti Noxon's own personal issues.
- An example of the trope in fiction: One episode of Boy Meets World involves Eric dating the aspiring singer/songwriter Corinna (played by real-life singer Leisha Hailey), whose songs are saccharine and completely unappealing. When he dumps her, she immediately starts writing dark and angry songs clearly directed at him; these sell, and she becomes a huge success. After a while she meets with Eric, ostensibly to apologize, but he quickly realizes she's just run out of material. Refusing to give her any, he acts nice to Corinna and manages to revert her to mindless schlock mode. Part of their conversation consists of singing some of "Tomorrow" from Annie.
- This troper thought that the episode was about Alanis Morissette, who followed a similar career path. See the "Music" section for more.
- A similar example to the above occurs on Seinfeld, when Jerry tells a would-be comic who he finds annoying that she's not funny. So, of course, when she premieres an act that centres entirely around insulting Jerry, she becomes a hit.
- A combination of Creator Breakdown and Executive Meddling may have contributed to Dave Chappelle abandoning Chappelles Show, even after the show had become a massive hit and the comedian was offered a $50 million (that's seven zeroes, BTW) contract by the network.
- Fictional example: Brian Topp in Spaced, whose default setting for all of his art is angsty, bizarre pieces directly based on his misery, fear, anger and self-loathing - except when he's happy, in which case he starts producing happy pictures of flowers and his girlfriend.
- Worse yet, the happy pictures are rubbish. Brian can only produce interesting, worthwhile art when miserable.
- Tim gets in on the act as well; flipping through his sketchbook one night, Daisy is alarmed and disturbed by the sheer volume of graphic, angry and hurt revenge pictures of Tim's ex-girlfriend, who betrayed him by cheating on him with her boss and kicked him out of their flat; then, she comes across a warm, happy sketch of Tim, herself and her dog Colin drawn after they moved in together.
- Portrayed in Mad About You: Jamie discovers that her ex-boyfriend has created his own comic whose primary villain, Queen Talon, looks exactly like Jamie. Reading through his work, she discovers several events that are exaggerated sci-fi versions of incidents from their relationship.
Theatre
- It's wildly debatable, but some scholars have linked Shakespeare's play Hamlet to the death of his son Hamnet shortly before the play was written. Including Harold Bloom.
Music
- It seems no hit song can be written without a good Creator Breakdown, from Simple Plan's "Untitled" to any song by Evanescence or Nine Inch Nails.
- In particular, Evanescence's songs "Hello" and "Like You" were inspired by the death of Amy Lee's sister when she was just a child.
- Probably the most famous musical Creator Breakdown of all time: Brian Wilson. Smile, in both the Beach Boys and solo versions, is an incredible suite of music, but there's no way it could have been composed by someone with a stable mind. And the unstable mind prevented the Beach Boys version from being released as it was intended: once "Sgt. Pepper" (by The Beatles) came out, Brian Wilson lost motivation.
- One of the best songs from Vicentico, the lead singer from the now defunct Argentinian group Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, was written after his brother died.
- After her rape, Tori Amos wrote "Me and a Gun."
- Subverted by the band Rancid. After guitarist Tim Armstrong's divorce they produced, not the expected angst-fest, but the rather upbeat album Indestructible, which featured a tribute to The Power Of Friendship in the form of the song "Fall Back Down."
- Singer/songwriter E, leader of the band Eels, wrote Electro-Shock Blues, arguably the band's best album, after the death of his mother from cancer and his sister's subsequent suicide. The album included poetry that his sister had written while in a mental hospital and included songs with titles like "Going to Your Funeral" and "Cancer for the Cure". The last track, however, was an upbeat number about learning to move on with life.
- The shocking death of his five-year-old son led Eric Clapton to retire from music for a while, then return with a very different sound to his repertoire. In particular, the song Tears in Heaven was written about his son.
- Before that, Clapton (as part of Derek and The Dominoes) recorded Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, an album born of the pain that results from being in love with his best friend's wife. The friend was George Harrison, by the way.
- The Queen songs "These Are The Days Of Our Lives," "I'm Going Slightly Mad," and "The Show Must Go On" were completed literally weeks before Freddie Mercury's death of AIDS -- all released on an album named "Innuendo."
- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' album "The Boatman's Call" - an unusually soft and touching album - came out shortly after Cave cleaned himself up of heroin.
- Cave's side project, Grinderman, is pretty much his midlife crisis set to music. The album has a song on it called "No Pussy Blues", which tells you everything you need to know.
- Even more recently subverted in his song "More News From Nowhere", an affectionate and angstfree reminiscence about most of his ex-girlfriends.
- Emiliana Torrini's second album Fisherman's Woman was much darker than her first, mostly because her boyfriend had been killed in a car accident.
- Luke Haines of The Auteurs had gained commercial success with the band's first album, New Wave, which was about the trials of showbiz, and minor commercial success with the second, Now I'm A Cowboy, which was about rising from the middle classes into the upper classes. Then, while touring for the second album, he became so depressed that he intentionally broke both his ankles jumping off a high wall. While wheelchair-bound, he went on to write the grim After Murder Park, the first single of which - the unbelievably titled "Unsolved Child Murder" - was released as a Christmas single. The Auteurs never got on the charts again, although Haines has remained much loved by critics.
- John Lennon wrote quite a few of these in his time. However, because he was John Lennon, most of them are still great songs (and some of them among the best things he ever wrote):
- "Norwegian Wood" is about an one-night-stand that Lennon had, written in a way as to prevent his wife finding out.
- "Cold Turkey" was clearly written by a man going through withdrawal from a heroin addiction, which Lennon was when he wrote and recorded the song.
- "How Do You Sleep?" is a bitter polemic directed at former songwriting partner Paul McCartney, in which he derides pretty much everything McCartney had done up to that point as worthless crap. It was written in response to at least one perceived slight against him on McCartney's album Ram.
- Pretty much every song on his first solo album, Plastic Ono Band, was written when he was going through Primal Scream therapy. The album was all about him addressing his personal issues--everything from his relationship with his dead mother to the break-up of the Beatles.
- Walls and Bridges. Most of the songs on that album appear to deal with the bad patch in John's relationship with Yoko Ono at the time--aka "the lost weekend." "Whatever Gets You through the Night" and "Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out)" are dead giveaways.
- "Steel and Glass," also from Walls and Bridges, is much like "How Do You Sleep?" only, this time, directed at former business manager Allen Klein, whom Lennon had just filed suit against.
- Subverted: after Anal Cunt lead Seth Putnam recovered from a coma he had fallen to due to alcohol and drug abuse, he wrote a song titled "Haha, You're in a coma". Not so surprising, really from a band with classics such as "Hitler Was a Sensible Man", "The Internet is Gay", "The Word Homophobia is Gay" and "I became a Counsellor to Tell the Rape Victims They Deserved it"
- Björk's more introverted albums, Medúlla and Vespertine, were considered to be in reaction to a letter bomb threat, though her first album after the incident, Homogenic, is very extroverted.
- Much of Trent Reznor's work with Nine Inch Nails up until "Year Zero" was the result of him angsting over something. The heroin abuse probably didn't help.
- Pink Floyd: After the success of Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here (a borderline case in itself, as it was in honour of Syd Barrett who himself had a Creator Breakdown and left the band), and Animals, the audience size grew and the older atmosphere of intimacy disappeared. After the angry Roger Waters spat on a rude audience member, Pink Floyd made the dark album The Wall. After that, Roger Waters' breakdown escalated; a few years later, Pink Floyd released Final Cut, in which Waters contemplated the death of his father in WWII and the Falklands War.
- Sting's third solo album, The Soul Cages, was written as a way to get past an almost-four-year-long writer's block following the sudden death of his parents. In this editor's opinion, it was his best and most emotionally powerful album ever.
- Blur's album 13 is a reaction to lead singer Damon Albarn's painful break-up with his long-time girlfriend Justine Frischman of the band Elastica.
- The Manic Street Preachers album The Holy Bible is almost entirely about Richey Edwards' various problems that led to him going missing (presumed dead) after it was released. Their next album, Everything Must Go, deals with some of their reaction to his death as well as featuring some of the last lyrics he wrote.
- Alanis Morissette's first hit You Oughta Know was inspired by an old boyfriend who dumped her for another woman. People are still wondering who that man was.
- "Alanis Morissette, she's our latest pride and joy / She used to sing about high school dances and chasing after boys / Now she is fed up and as angry as can be / She's got one hand in her pocket, and the other's on guard for thee"
- Dave Coulier (of Full House) is considered the consensus choice, and he has admitted that at least some of the lyrics hit close to home.
- Likewise, Carly Simon's song You're so Vain also was written after a really nasty break-up. In her case, it's said the man was Warren Beatty; Carly Simon says that she is never going to tell.
- Just about every note on the two Joy Division albums is a serious autobiographical downer from Ian Curtis. And 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' wasn't even on those albums.
- Gloria Estefan's song "Coming Out Of The Dark" was about her struggles with her rehab from the wreck that nearly left her paralyzed from the neck down.
- Similarly, Teddy Pendergrass' "In My Time" was a reflection of his life after the car crash that left him a paraplegic.
- Let us not forget No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom; many of its songs deal with Gwen Stefani's break-up with the bass player.
- This happened to Type O Negative twice: First was 1999's World Coming Down, which came after having gone Lighter And Softer for the last two albums - they even refuse to perform anything from that album live because it reminds frontman Peter Steele of the worst part of his life; the second one was made after him being imprisoned for narcotics possession and going through rehab, in a display of the band's trademark sardonic sense of humour it was called Dead Again.
- Australian singer Sia wrote the song "Breathe Me
 " after the death of her boyfriend. The introspective song was used as the final musical track to be played in the HBO series Six Feet Under.
- Parodied in the Beautiful South song "Song For Whoever", in which a songwriter gleefully describes how the songs he writes based on the various relationships he's had with his girlfriends -- good or bad -- bring in piles of cash for him ("Deep, so deep / The number one I hope reap / Depends upon the tears you weep / So cry, lover, cry!").
- Redeemer and Fuse by Beth Kinderman, not quite a breakdown, but she was definitely angry at someone.
- Parodied by Weird Al Yankovic in the song "Since You've Been Gone". The entire song is about how horrible his life has been since the break up, but ends with the line "I feel almost as bad as I did when you were still here".
- And possibly a straight example by him: "One More Minute", which features lyrics such as "I'd rather spend eternity eating shards of broken glass / than spend one more minute with you". The video includes Al ripping up a picture that allegedly shows his most recent ex-girlfriend at the time.
- After most of her band died in a plane crash, Reba McEntire recorded an album appropriately titled For My Broken Heart to work through her grief.
- Johnny Cash had a few of these. Ring of Fire, his most successful song, is about the songwriter's feelings about Cash himself. Chicken In Black is a pretty straightforward shot at his recording label of the time. Many people view his cover of Hurt as feelings towards his life as a whole as he neared the end.
- Beck's Sea Change was written in response to a break-up, and oh my does it ever show.
- Late-romantic-period composer Gustave Mahler is the rare instrumental version of this. One of his symphonies even ends with the beheading of the hero at the hands of the French revolution... which is naturally followed by a majestic fanfare to said government.
- A breakdown in reverse; The Pet Shop Boys' album Very is notably one of their most relaxed, optimistic and lush, with songs such as 'Liberation' and 'I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing' creating a liberated, free and unburdened tone. The album was the first released after Neil Tennant publicly came out as a homosexual.
- And years before that, Tennant played this trope straight by writing It's a Sin to describe his hellish years in a Catholic school in Newcastle. It doesn't help that the video for the song is full of heavy Medieval and Catholic-related imaginary, including a young Geena Davies as one of the Seven Cardinal Sins (she was the personification of Pride, if you wonder) and Tennant reciting the Comfiteor prayer, which Catholics use to express their shame for their sins (Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea grandissima culpa...).
- The allegations of child abuse leveled against Michael Jackson in 1993 meant that some songs and/or videos on his subsequent albums boiled down to rants about being victimized. (There's also the self-pitying "Childhood".) Even worse, his self-promotion as "The King of Pop" escalated into self-martyrdom, and his unwillingness to change his eccentric lifestyle - leading to a second round of accusations of child abuse in 2003 - turned his casual fans against him (including this troper, who didn't buy those albums and was amused by how bitter the lyrics were when she read them), at least in the U.S. He still does not seem to understand this; his reaction to Sony's unwillingness to throw good money after bad in the promotion of the underperforming (by his standards) Invincible in the U.S. suggests that he does not understand this.
- Hector Berlioz's then-unrequited love for actress Harriet Smithson led him to write Symphonie fantastique.
- Skillet's song "Open Wounds" is based on frontman John Cooper's angry relationship with his father after his mother died of cancer. They later made up, however.
- Metallica's latest and critically-panned album, St. Anger, suffered from major Creator Breakdown during its production, as shown in the documentary Some Kind of Monster.
- Their fourth album, ...And Justice For All, is possibly their most aggressive. It was recorded shortly after original bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a bus accident.
- James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" was initially the focus of a rumor that it was written in response to his band's secretly arranging for Taylor's girlfriend to visit him on tour, only for her plane to crash, based on the lines "Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you" and "Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground." In fact, Suzanne was his friend from rehab, who commited suicide shortly after his release. The song still qualifies.
- Carlo Gesualdo's style and subject matter for his madrigals changed drastically after he caught his wife and her lover in the act and brutally murdered both of them.
- Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater has a habit of this. His first song for Dream Theater, "A Change of Seasons", dealt with the cycle of life in relation to the death of his mother. "The Mirror" off of Awake was about how alcoholism was slowly ruining his life. "Burning My Soul" and "Just Let Me Breathe" from the album Falling into Infinity were rants about the music industry loaded with Take Thats against his band's current and former producers, Kurt Cobain, MTV, and others. Then he started writing a still ongoing series of songs about his experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. "Honor Thy Father" off of Train of Thought is a big Take That to his stepfather. For Octavarium he wrote "Never Enough", where he vented about nagging, ungrateful fans. Someone needs a hug...
- Ironically, this troper feels that Dream Theater's best work came from these breakdowns. See also: Space Dye Vest.
- Because True Art Is Angsty, and because he tries to be optimistic, Paul McCartney is most likely to produce critically-accepted work when he's in the middle of a personal crisis. His most critically accepted solo album, Wings's Band on the Run, was recorded during a disastrous trip to Nigeria: Creative Differences left the band with only three members; it was the rainy season; the studio was barely usable at first; and he and Linda got careless, tried to walk to their lodgings on their own, and then got mugged at knifepoint. Near the end, he passed out from what may have been a heart attack...
- Marvin Gaye's 1978 double LP Here, My Dear was famous for its themes of lost love and estrangement, and was widely panned by critics and fans upon its initial release for being too bleak and uncommercial compared with his previous work. There was a good reason for the album's tone: it was originally conceived shortly after Gaye's 1975 divorce from Anna Gordy, and due to Gaye's financial troubles at the time, it was suggested by Gaye's lawyer that he use half the royalties from his next album to pay her alimony. Gaye originally intended to make an intentionally bad album to spite her, but after working on some of the songs he had a change of heart and decided to make a serious, confessional effort at chronicling his feelings about the breakup instead.
- Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata was influenced by what he endured from society while having an affair with the soprano who most inspired him artistically.
Film
- Parodied in the movie A Mighty Wind, where folk music duo Mitch & Miki broke up in a particularly messy romantic dysfunct, and Mitch proceeded to release several solo albums with titles and cover art demonstrating an increasingly absurd degree of emotional breakdown.
- Parodied (and expertly summarized) in The Wedding Singer. Robbie's breakdown occurred while he was writing a love song for the woman who would later leave him at the altar; the lyrics and style of that song start with fluffy romance, switch suddenly to extreme rage, dissolve into shocked sadness, and finally end with despairing "kill me now" Wangst.
- Further emphasised in the musical of The Wedding Singer -- immediately after Linda leaves him (and after the above song, aptly titled "Somebody Kill Me"), Robbie and his band play at a wedding. The set begins with a half-assed, drunken attempt at the cheery opening number, and dissolves into a venomous rock song led by Robbie about the horrors of love, called "Casualty of Love" -- sung directly to the bride and groom, with the rest of the wedding party joining in. And it's sung to the tune of "I Love Rock And Roll".
- After going through an emotionally painful divorce and the resulting custody battle over his daughter, David Cronenberg made The Brood, where experimental psychiatry enables the Author Avatar protagonist's psychotic wife Nola to manifest her mental trauma physically as deformed mutant children who abduct the Author Avatar's daughter and kill anyone whom Nola views as personal enemies. Does This Remind You Of Anything?
- Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay for Scarface while trying to kick his cocaine habit.
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was produced while George Lucas was going through a divorce. Lucas has admitted that this may be why the film was made so much Darker And Edgier than its predecessor.
- Martin Scorsese came to the decision to make Raging Bull at the behest of actor and close friend Robert DeNiro when Scorsese had a life-threatening cocaine addiction. The tone of this movie with its themes of sin, punishment and redemption is largely inspired by the director's struggles to get his life back in order.
- Roman Polanski's version of Macbeth is more bloody than other versions (and with a way darker ending than the play) because it was made after his wife and unborn child was murdered.
Comic Books
- What happened to Dave Sim -- more than once -- while writing Cerebus The Aardvark. With increasing frequency, he would halt the plot in order to lecture at length about his new religion/theory-of-everything that he created from equal parts Old Testament, conspiracy theory and vast galloping misogyny. Any characters or plot points that didn't fit his new view on life were hammered flat until they did. Note that this is unrelated to Cerebus Syndrome, which occurred to the comic long before his breakdown.
- Grant Morrison made a point of feeding his own personal life and interests into The Invisibles, including making a deformed villain based on the miscarriage that his girlfriend had. Weirdly, this also went the other way; Morrison is a magician and believed that in The Invisibles he was creating a giant magical work that would reshape his life. Whether or not this is the case, there were some odd moments of synchronicity -- like the time his Marty Stu character, King Mob, was shot in the chest, and Morrison was subsequently hospitalised with a collapsed lung.
- He then wrote the character all better.
- Morrison is somewhat of a master of this trope, as he wrote about the death of his cat being used in his ground-breaking Animal Man series. In issue 26, he notes how as a creator he at once has the pain, but relishes the opportunity to craft this into a story.
- Morrison subsequently deliberately wallowed in negativity (resulting in at least one suicide attempt) in order to write the very dark comedy The Filth. Morrison saw it as a way of passing through the Kabbalistic abyss that represents the darkness at the depths of the human heart and mind, but he's like that.
- Morrison also admitted that personal tragedies contributed to the very dark "Planet X" arc of New X-Men.
- Morrison is currently inverting this trope, as writing Batman has pushed him to exercise harder than he ever has in his life.
- James O'Barr created the comic The Crow to deal with his grief over losing his fiancée Bethany, who was killed by a drunk driver.
- Steve Ditko is the revered co-creator of the Marvel Universe among other creations. However, when he does not have a collaborator like Stan Lee to restrain him, his later stories tend to be barely more than self-righteous lectures about Objectivism.
- When Peter David started writing The Incredible Hulk, he promised that he wouldn't kill off Betty Ross, Hulk's long-time love interest, partly because the character was one of his wife's favourites. Not long after, he and his wife went through a painful divorce. Not long after that, Betty Ross met a rather painful end in the comics. David has since come out and admitted that the strip was more than a little influenced by his real-life circumstances and, had things happened differently (not limited to the fact that he was soon taken off the book), he would have let Betty live.
- Geoff Johns' sister died in the crash of TWA Flight 800. Surprisingly, nothing horrible happened to the character based on her, the Star-Spangled Kid (now known as Stargirl). However, the situation did inspire an influential arc of JSA, in which Atom Smasher loses his mother in an airplane crash, then substitutes the villain Extant -- who killed Al's godfather -- in place of his mother after a big reality-altering plot implodes. This led to the revitalization of Black Adam and the series' arguable high point, Black Reign.
- Mystek of the Justice League Task Force was Thrown Out The Airlock due to a tag-team combo of Executive Meddling and the resulting Creator Breakdown. As writer Christopher Priest explains at his website:
We eventually introduced a character named Mystek, but I killed her off when her miniseries was not approved. Mystek was supposed to be a creator-owned character, developed under a first-look deal, and I was instructed to put her into JLTF to introduce her to the fans in preparation for her miniseries. Then there was no series, so I shoved her out an airlock in JLTF #32.
Standup Comedy
- Maurice LaMarche quit standup after his father got murdered. Eventually he got back into entertainment via voice acting, where he is currently a god.
- Richard Herring's Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace routine was the true story of the comedian trying to beat depression by performing some seemingly impossible tasks. It works, mostly because he actually succeeds in dating fifty women in fifty days through the novel method of "asking", and is cheered up by the number of single women there are in the world. He also gains new levels of self esteem by succeeding in finishing a 'Consecutive Number Plate Spotting' game he started when he was a kid on holiday.
Newspaper Comics
- Inverted with Charles Schulz and Peanuts: naturally, after years of success, a happy marriage, and having millions of people love his work, the strip lost much of the melancholy and cruel edge that made it so innovative and popular in the first place. It was no longer a Crapsack World, just one full of oddities and absurdities.
- Chester Gould and Dick Tracy: Although Gould was having a great run from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, his efforts gradually went Off The Rails. For instance, he failed to appreciate that the tastes of his readers had changed or that his grotesque villains, such as the Flyface family, might now turn people off. Furthermore, he took leave of his artistic senses and subjected the strip to a silly Sci Fi period, with Tracy having adventures on the Moon with the moon people until the reality of the Apollo 11 landing forced him to backtrack. Finally, Gould's stubborn grousing about the justice system and noodling with pointless half-stories in the 1970s painted him as a cranky old man; this killed much of the interest in the strip.
- Bill Watterson, the maker of Calvin And Hobbes, had many of these. When his cat, which had served as an inspiration for Hobbes, died, he made a comic about Calvin and Hobbes discussing how they can still play in their dreams. When his agent, bored of his anti-commercialism views, said he sees all in black and white, Watterson drew a strip where Calvin literally starts seeing all in black and white as a result of his father saying it to him. Quoth the Watterson:
During my fight to keep the syndicate from licensing my work, I sometimes drew strips that had additional private meanings for myself. [...] I wouldn't have drawn these if the material didn't stand on its own, or if it was in any way inconsistent with the characters, but cartoons such as these helped me laugh at my predicament at a time when very little about it seemed funny.
- The real-life feud between Lil' Abner artist Al Capp and Joe Palooka artist Ham Fisher (Capp's former boss, who claimed Capp stole the Lil Abner concept from him) raged for two decades, occasionally spilling into their respective strips. Fisher took things further, accusing Capp of sneaking obscene imagery into Abner strips, producing "proof" to show to a New York judge. Capp easily refuted the accusations by showing the strips in print, where the "offending" images were not present. When that failed, Fisher "anonymously" sent a packet of pornographic Lil' Abner pictures to the FCC in an effort to torpedo Capp's attempt at a TV license. He was swiftly found out and expelled from the National Cartoonist Society (an organization he helped found). He committed suicide less than a year later; such was his isolation that his body wasn't discovered for four months.
- Al Capp himself underwent an idealogical shift in The Sixties from his original liberal, anti-big business ideals to conservative and rabidly anti-counter culture: he frequently lampooned counter-culture icons and went out of his way to confront and debate the Left every chance he got. (His infamous confrontation with John Lennon was captured in the documentary Imagine.) His increasingly angry strips and media appearances cost him newspaper slots and his semi-regular guest spot on The Tonight Show.
- In his final years, BC creator Johnny Hart became a fervent Christian fundamentalist and started cramming these views into his previously light-hearted caveman gag-strip. Hilarity did not ensue.
- Many fans feel that Lynn Johnston's For Better Or For Worse has radically deteriorated as it nears the end of its run. A big part of the problem, evidently, is the real-life break-up of Johnston's marriage; she appears now unalterably determined to hammer the characters into her vision of a "perfect family life" no matter how much collateral artistic damage this causes.
Webcomics
- Real Life Comics suffered from a form of Creator Breakdown twice, both times when Greg Dean broke up with his then-current girlfriends. Rather than affect the quality of the series, though, he simply took a brief hiatus from the comic (as he didn't feel like working on it at the time) and returned a week or so later and picked up where he left off, with the ex-girlfriend's character vanishing without a trace and never mentioned again. Of course, Greg has since gotten married, so these mini-breakdowns may be a thing of the past.
- In 2002, Ubersoft.net took two-and-a-half months out from an ongoing plotline to inflict the author's computer woes on one of the main characers.
- While the official explanation for why RPG World was canceled is due to Artist Disillusionment, the fact that the main arc just suddenly ended without any noticeable decline in quality during the ostensible final storyline, along with a couple post-script side stories that basically curb-stomped the characters, seems less like actual burnout and more like some event really turned the author against his work.
- Supposedly, he was infuriated with his readers for not loving his photo-comic filler strips about the inane antics of the people supposedly actually playing RPG World as much as they loved, y'know, the actual comic. (Never mind that the photo comics were essentially just bland Two Gamers On A Couch gags.) Ending the comic may have been as much Take That as Creator Breakdown.
- Parodied in a brief Bob And George storyline, in which the author character becomes extremely depressed, causing the strip to start to fall apart.
- Real Life seems to have been playing Break The Cutie with Maritza Campos, author of College Roomies From Hell, slowly but surely, since 1999. It shows.
Commercials
Real Life Example (Although, after a fashion, nearly everything on this page is a real-life example, since the trope relates to the reactions of mostly real-life authors.)
- This editor had a guy in her high school art class whose relationship status was always apparent by what art he came up with. At first, he drew lots of pictures about death. When he got a girlfriend, he was suddenly drawing lots of flowers and sunshiney landscapes. They broke up and it was back to death, death, violence, death. New girlfriend and the flowers and sunshine return. Wash, rinse, repeat.
- This troper's poetry tends to work itself around his real life themes whether he wants to or not: he's begun a poem more than once with a clear idea of the wordplay and rhythm he wants to create only to see it become very topical indeed, and often lose the initial idea.
- One of the Big Bad's of The Schoolkids Saga turned out to be a evil, petty minded, sadistic, reality warping villain who was manipulating all the other characters for motives that barely progressed beyond her own twisted amusement and hate-filled revenge fantasies. This occurred shortly after one of the readers pointed out that the story seemed obsessed with making cute girls cry.
- This troper is currently in the middle of writing a complicated story where someone psychically takes over the world, and is a pretty nice ruler, except for her immediate flogging of anyone who cuts her off on the highway.
- This troper once broke off a friendship with a married woman for fear that he was developing romantic feelings for her. He wrote approximately a dozen short stories in the following year; the usual themes were 1. "two people find love against all odds", 2) "woman does not know that someone loves her and thus cannot reciprocate", and 3) "man in an isolated location commits suicide". Only now that he's happily married (to a completely different woman) has this troper realized what he was writing about the whole time.
- This troper once named a character after a girl with whom he has long had a love/hate relationship. You can tell how he felt about her at the time based upon whether the character is a Bad Ass Anti Villain Noble Demon or an Ax Crazy sociopath.
- A friend of this troper criticized the main villain of a story this troper is working on, saying the villain wasn't frightening in the least. Later, the friend (who is something of a men's rights advocate) learned that female on male rape was real after reading about it and was greatly disquieted. This troper gleefully had the (female) villain rape a young boy in a later chapter. This ended up becoming a character trait for the villain, to insure readers absolutely hated her.
- This troper had a webcomic-author buddy who insisted on writing her friends into the comic as important characters. When she'd manage to alienate a lot of those friends at once, she had to restart the comic entirely as she couldn't stand using those very-plot important characters; instead she used her current gaggle of buddies for those spots. And a month later she broke up with her boyfriend and had to stop the story again. You'd think one would eventually stop sticking Expys of their friends in when they chase them off with alarming regularity.
- This guy recently discovered that most of his recent poetry was about his love-hate relationship with literary analysis and pop culture. He is currently planning on expanding these themes into a novel, because it might be fun.
- This troper's father once talked to a playwright that was feeling conflicted. On one hand, the man's marriage was collapsing, he couldn't find work, his parents had recently passed away... "but thanks to all that, I'm writing some really great stuff."
- This troper recently wrote two short fanfics, one about suicide and one about dealing with the loss of a parent. There's something to be said for choosing a fandom whose characters have the same issues as you do.
- This troper was forced to leave college by a painful and expensive (yet relatively minor) illness and has been working manual-labor jobs ever since. During this period he became a Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan, based largely on season 6, and began writing fanfic after years of thinking about it. Though he's capable of writing passable humor, his major current project is DeadWar, a long series about the chaos after Buffy herself becomes a vampire.
- This troper once had a horrible, months-long argument with her brother/best friend. She broke off all communication with him for a while and during that time did things she regrets to her writing, such as having characters die, move, break up, and stop speaking to their jerky brothers. After the argument was settled, she wrote a big dramatic story to fix all the problems but the death, and the series snapped write back to love, happiness, and bunnies. Although the tone has been slightly darker since then...
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