Are pretty people often better writers?

>>24549877 (OP)
Pretty people are better at everything.

no, my prose is awful

>>24549877 (OP)
Statistically, no. Although they might be better at finding an agent or getting published based on their looks. Ugly and average people have to rely on talent alone.

Nah they havnt had enough shitty life experiences

>>24549877 (OP)
On the very largest most general scale you would expect:
physically attractive = evidence of reproductive superiority = evidence of health + good genes
and you would expect health + good genes to correlate with being better at pretty much everything

e.g. One example of how this plays out:
women with hour-glass figures are sexy
they are sexy because they are healthy (not obese) so small waists
but they have wide hips so they can give birth to babies with big heads hence big brains
and they have big tits so they can feed these babies well

so all this basically means attractive = good and unattractive = bad

however, this is pretty general and only very small correlation and it's almost completely drowned out by the random noise of individual variations

so another question:—
is there something that counteracts this very general trend?
i.e. is there something about being in some way unhealthy or genetically inferior which makes you more likely to be a better writer?

some claim there is.

some claim that e.g. having tuberculosis means you are more likely to be a better writer
this might work in several ways of course
having T.B. might not make you actually more talented at writing
but IF you have tuberculosis, you can't do vigorous physical stuff, so you have to be a wimpish bookworm rather than going off and being a PIRATE like a proper man
so it might make you more likely to BECOME a writer
but that still means, tubercular frail men are more likely to be good writers, so the correlation is there.
(R. L. Stevenson & D. H. Lawrence are typical examples of this sort of "frail -> writer" thing)

another possible argument is that becoming a writer is a weird thing and you need some sort of subtle "psychic wound"
and this will somehow correlate with physical appearance.
this is possible, but it's tenuous


I have faith in almost all human superiority correlating with almost all other human superiority. Sure you get some weird specialization, but the trend is not that way.

In other words, suppose you pick two activities, X and Y, at random. They could be anything. Cooking, writing poems, wooing women, hunting lions, playing the banjo, designing bridges, doing stand-up comedy, etc

Now if you pick two people at random, and person A is naturally better at activity X than person B
then person A is more likely to be naturally better at activity Y as well.

(I say naturally" because with activities that need a lot of time to master, if you master one thing, you might be LESS likely to be good at another thing because you just haven't spent the time on it. Although even there, I think the main trend over-rides this, more often than not.)


tl;dr
— Better people are better in every way. Hence, more attractive people will be better writers.

>>24551467
You start with a half-baked evo-psych assumption ("attractive = healthy = good genes") and then inflate it into a totalizing worldview where hot people are good at everything — including writing. But the history of literature overwhelmingly suggests the opposite: some of the best writers have been neurotic, unattractive, chronically ill, socially alienated, or emotionally unbalanced. Not in spite of that — but because of it.

Let’s Talk Empirical Evidence:

Writers are more prone to mental illness than the general population. Studies show higher incidence of depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia spectrum traits, and neuroticism in creative writers (Kay Jamison, 1989; Andreasen, 1987).

Physical appearance does not correlate with IQ, creativity, or verbal ability in any significant way. These are separate, modular traits.

The "hot = good genes = good at everything" model fails across domains. Being attractive helps in social settings — it doesn’t help you write Ulysses, survive exile in Siberia, or write letters like Kafka.

The Real Writer Archetype?

Writers are, historically and psychologically, not the “optimized human specimen.” They are:

Often excluded, not adored

Observers, not participants

Filled with unresolved inner conflict

Motivated by rejection, alienation, illness, trauma, or simply too much time alone


If anything, being physically unattractive or unfit for physical life pushes people toward literature. It doesn’t guarantee talent, but it builds the inner life needed to fuel it. Rimbaud was a teenage dropout. Proust had severe asthma and lived in a cork-lined room. Dostoevsky had epilepsy and debt. Dickinson was a recluse. Kafka looked like a ghost with a 6-pack of neuroses.

You think these people would’ve written what they did if they were busy being sexy and popular? Come on.

Attractive people often receive external validation early and often. They’re liked, praised, invited, and engaged. They don't need to cultivate a dense interior life to survive. Writing is a compensation mechanism. It's an escape hatch. It’s often the voice of the marginal — not the triumphant.

The writer is the one standing outside the party, not hosting it.

Your entire framework — that beauty, health, intelligence, and skill cluster into “general superiority” — is comforting if you believe the world rewards the best. But literature doesn’t work that way. Writing is not the domain of the universally gifted. It’s the realm of the haunted, the over-observant, the emotionally raw.

Not only are unattractive, unhealthy, or maladjusted people more likely to become writers — they’re more likely to be good at it.

>>24551485

There is a lot of truth in what you say, most ofwhich I acknowledged in the bit about tuberculosis, although I might not have given it the weight it deserved.

But I still claim that even if you want a certain amount of neuroticism, etc to become a good writer (even if you want to be the observer, not the doer, and so on) *you still want to be the best physical specimen possible*.

So in other words, if we want to build the ideal writer, we don't want to start with a bad physical specimen. We want him to have a lot of energy and a good brain, and that correlates with good body.

So we ideally want, perhaps, someone who physically COULD / SHOULD have been an alpha chad, except that something very small went wrong and pushed him into being a sigma recluse. But the small thing should be as small as possible. (Or alternatively, we want someone who physically was an alpha chad but either combined that with writing or did that in his twenties and then slowed down a bit and did writing in his thirties.)

Byron is a good example of what I mean. His "psychic wound" came from the club foot and being sexually abused as a child, as far as we can gather, but he was definitely physically attractive.

It's not as weird as it sounds. Aeschylus was more proud of having fought at Marathon than of any of his plays. Plato was a good wrestler. Socrates supposedly was a fine soldier with exceptional endurance and fortitude (he didn't write anything directly but he wrote stuff indirectly, via talking to Plato, unless you think he's basically just an invention of Plato, which is a minority view). Most of the Elizabethan writers were physically tough, and so on.


I remember in "Seymour — An Introduction", there's something like this. If you haven't read it, Seymour Glass is a poet who commits suicide and the book is his brother reminiscing about him. And at one point the brother says something like, "although poets are often very poor custodians of their bodies, more often than not they are issued a pretty good one to start off with." Of course you can dismiss this as being just one comment by one fictional character, but I'm wondering if Salinger had noticed it as a general trend.


I still think the idea that basic physical inferiority correlates positively with any sort of natural aptitude is almost always wrong, but it's an idea that's pushed a lot these days.