There’s this belief that anger and adversity produce the best art. I’m not certain who actually believes it, but it does seem to be a truism of sorts that is rarely challenged.

I have never achieved success in any of the arts, apart from coming second in a short story competition of some repute when I was eleven years old.

I wasn’t massively angry when I was eleven—although I was a bit gutted that the kid who beat me was only eight. I must’ve beaten loads of other eleven-year-olds to come second, but there was still some ignominy in being runner-up to a much younger child.

She completely deserved to beat me; hers was a story of charm and precocious wit. Mine was an unashamed rip-off of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

My life after the age of eleven—my secondary school years, if you will—were full of anger and adversity, and I achieved next to nothing in that time aside from a reasonable, though mildly disappointing, set of GCSEs.

But maybe I was never destined to produce any art of note. I clearly have ambitions of writing, but if I couldn’t produce anything in my twenties when I was angry about loads of stuff (mostly misplaced anger about stuff that was pretty much my fault), then apparently I have no chance now that I’m in my thirties and, for the most part, relatively content.

Although, I do write a lot more now than I did then. So from a productivity point of view, contentment seems to be winning.

The nature of my current job means that I do meet plenty of people going through fairly genuine adversity, and most of them are pretty angry about it. But none of them produce much in the way of quality art.

Conversely, the successful artists that I have encountered have seemed, to my eyes, to be quite privileged, with only a set of ‘first-world’ problems to moan about.

Perhaps the overcoming of adversity is a natural path to artistic greatness, and I’m certain there are some great examples of this. I’d imagine, though, that genuine adversity is far too much of a practical barrier for art to be produced at all in most cases.