Rx: for what ails you, work

To novelist Alice Adams in 1960, while breaking up with his second wife, author Saul Bellow wrote:

“The only cure is to write a book. I have a new one on the table and all other misery is gone.”


Mozart used to quote from himself, from work to work, and if it was good enough for him, surely for me. So, may we quote from "Extraordinary Comebacks: 201 Inspiring Stories of Courage, Triumph, and Success":

95. KING, STEPHEN

OUT FOR HIS DAILY FOUR-MILE WALK NEAR HIS
summer home in Lovell, Maine, on June 19, 1999, superstar
author Stephen King was hit by a minivan. Suffering a collapsed
lung and several broken bones, he was raced to the
hospital at 110 mph over country roads. King nearly died.

Recovery was slow and painful, and the physical
therapy was grueling. King doubted his ability to ever
write again. But he did write again, five weeks after the
accident, and King eventually said it offered the best
therapy of all, even though it didn’t seem that way at the
outset. There was no inspiration that first day, only a
stubbornness and a determination and a hope that
things would get better, he said. That resolve was
enough to get King started.

King finished On Writing, his tome about the craft of
writing, in 2000 and turned to his long-stalled Dark Tower
series in the following years. He even ended up writing
himself, and his near-fatal accident, into the seven-volume
series. He later told interviewers that he was using the
work as a painkiller because it was more effective than any
pharmaceutical the doctors had prescribed.

Though King has permanent physical ailments as a
result of the accident, he didn’t lose his sense of humor.
He eventually purchased the van that caused him so much
pain for $1,500 so he could smash it with a sledgehammer.