A study by Frank Barron found that uncreative people choose things which are clear and orderly while creative people are challenged by chaos. They make an order out of it which is their own.
 
When these three writers encountered catastrophes which did not match their image of how life was supposed to be, they used creativity to transform themselves.

I interviewed both Deena Metzger and Elie Wiesel for my book Undaunted Spirits – Portraits of Recovery from Trauma but I knew Anne Sexton best. As her graduate student, I studied with her from 1973 to 1974 as she careened toward suicide.

In Sexton’s early career, she illustrated how creativity opens to becoming but toward the end, her pathological ideas became a closed circuit.