How Writers Channel Their Anger into Their Work
Get angry about something important, then write about it!
Mr Nosky was my art professor. One day, I asked him what he meant when he kept repeating how important it is to eliminate the sentimental from your work.
He came over to my charcoal drawing, and asked me a question, “What use is that beautiful sweeping line amongst the folds of that dress?”
I replied that it looked beautiful, and added to the interest in the drawing.
He agreed that the charcoal line that represented the taut edge of drapes falling around the model’s foot, did look lovely, but that it was meaningless, sentimental, and had absolutely no function to the ‘whole’.
The beautiful line of dark dust created its own beautiful moment, and detracted from the whole drawing — enough to ruin the whole thing.
That was my first lesson in “kill your darlings”.
In writing we are strongly advised to eradicate, ruthlessly, any pretty writing that we love so much, it will distract from the rest.
It’s true of all art.
Now, is the darling sentence the most important element, or do you have something more important to say?
The sentimental calms our nerves and make us feel gleeful, happy, relaxed. We could sit back with a glass of red wine and gently write our piece, weaving clever sentences together as we sip our wine. Our tipsy brain reeling on the waves of pretty prose.
Mr Nosky, my professor, went on to tell me something more important.
“You need to channel your anger into your work — try it, find out what it means. It’ll cause you to work with urgency.”
We all get angry about something.
Anger is negative energy.
We can take it, as it begins to course through our veins, and use it as fire in our writing.
It’s up to the individual how anger expresses itself— constructively controlled, or as a cloudburst every ten minutes. Like a storm warning for everybody to get their umbrellas and wellington boots out. They’re going to get an anger shower.
If you know what you want to write about, exactly, then you are fortunate — there are a lot of people who want to write, dearly, but find it difficult to know why.
There’s the desire to write something, a good start. Then there’s the burning ambition to write something that resonates so broadly that it spreads across the mind like a master landscape of thought.
It demands to be read. Each sentence has meaning that locks into the next sentence like a chain of well crafted events.
Anger is simply energy — frustration, stunted ideas, blocked passages of thought that have missed the opportunity to be heard.
We express anger when we stump our toe on a bedpost during the night. We express anger when life serves up its bad side of things; money, love, and home — all going the wrong way, can cause anger to rise like a vengeful fire breathing dragon.
If we take the bait, we expel the energy and the anger, then calm down — often red-faced, and sorry about our actions; then we start to think about how we can constructively solve the problem.
Life can be frustrating, most of the time. We live, we suffer, nobody escapes this. It’s because of this that we seek ways to express our deep anger about life, the things that people do, the politics of madness that rules the world, the fears that accompany us daily — even while shopping for ice cream, our hearts are full of angry sentiments. Traces of anger speckle our each living moment like the cold stracciatella.
We learn to navigate through the speckles of anger, trying our best to avoid the big chunks that could cause an outrage; stay calm, be a Mensch, don’t say anything about how damned angry you feel.
Writers aren’t like that, they write to make waves. It could be big waves that reveal truths, or it could be fiction that causes a wave of feeling and understanding to roll through the reader’s mind — to make them think about what irks them most.
All I know is this, when Mr Nosky, my art professor, talked to me about channelling anger, I knew he was on to something big.
I was young and still picking up on how to understand myself as an artist and a person. I used what he gave me, and experimented with the idea of “channel your anger into your work”, it helped me enormously. I felt as if I’d discovered a secret about myself.
Anger is an emotion, and emotions are energy. They flow, or become stinted.
Often, writers can hold themselves back with the fear that they’ll write something that really, really, pisses people off. The imagination would tell us that if we “go too far” we’ll then be all alone, and nobody will read our work. Quite often, writers discover that that’s exactly what they should’ve been doing the whole time — writing about what really pisses us off.
When we write about the big thing that gets our goat in life, the situation in the world that we know is unjust, or just plain wrong, then we write with power. It then comes from within, from the energy of anger being transformed into constructive prose that doesn’t quibble or turn circles for fun.
