An intention to spread good news, and to not add to the flow of problems seems to be bearing fruit for me. I feel like I am in a better place creatively, and psychically too.
Digging into the crap that people liberally sprinkle everywhere, and then taking a handful of it and spreading it around myself really was making me feel pretty damned hopeless. Straight up anger translates into poetry pretty well, and a rant can be transformed into a rap Exploding larger and more complex problems lends itself to fiction, and I can achieve a better sense of the logic and chaos in a situation by writing characters coming from both places.
I was finding that an over-focusing on non-fiction writing, and getting locked into the pattern of thinking of it as commentary or reportage, meant that the work wasn’t as solution based as fiction and poetry tend to be. Creative fiction demands resolution or adopting a viewpoint that parses even failure as something triumphant, because it is in the end art.
The muscles exercise themselves differently throughout the year, I suppose, but perhaps the writing should be more like farming than anything else – one crop for a time allowed to drain certain minerals, and then a different crop to replenish the field. I am looking to keep my energy rolling, and I am not interested in celebrating the dead-end of no solutions.
Frustration comes from building ourselves a cage when we know we can write ourselves an open field and a blue sky.