How to Find the Emotional Energy to Write When Times Are Bad
This week I was listening to a Swedish artist and YouTuber whose channel I love: Jonna Jinton. She made a comment that it’s hard for an artist to create when surrounded by negativity. She was discussing a personal situation, but I know that the beginning of 2020 was hard for me in more ways than one. In all of the flurry of change and information about what was happening in the world, it was hard to concentrate on my writing. But what if the world and our own lives are often negative? How do we keep creating amidst negativity?
Isn’t that a million dollar question? I can’t say what the ultimate answer is, if there is one, but I can tell you what helps me.
Say Something
The first approach is to confront the issue head on. If you read a lot, you’ve almost certainly noticed that a lot of authors write in order to speak to a situation in the world. From Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, to David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, each of these addresses a contemporary and/or past issue in the writer’s culture or the world at large.
This isn’t preaching at readers. Rather, it’s a way of both working through the situation as an artist and engaging readers in an awareness of the issue. As authors, writing about the things that affect us the most can be cathartic and can help us to sort through our thoughts and feelings so that we understand what we believe about what we’re facing.
This is true with anything – not just large-scale societal ills or global drama. The more personally affected we are by what we address in our writing, the more it will speak to readers as well. I like Don Roff’s saying:
There are many ways to interpret this. It could be that what scares us is a point of anxiety about the world. But it could also be something that’s so deeply personal – a long-held struggle or pain point – that to expose it feels very vulnerable and frightening. Either one could be a source of powerful writing.
The goal with this type of writing is to gain our own understanding (and possibly healing) and to make readers aware of the problem in order to elicit a widespread desire to address it.
Create Something Better
An alternative approach is to do just the opposite: ignore the current situation and instead create a world that gives readers (and ourselves) a respite from the troubles of our lives. There are lots of ways to do this.
- We can write stories that take place in the present day and age, but without the troubles we’d like to forget. These can be in any genre, especially in those that are farthest from real life. For example, my family tends to watch a lot of spy thriller types of movies. So it struck me as strange when one of my family members refused to watch an intense movie with danger in it. It wasn’t until someone else pointed out to me that spy movies feel like fantasy to a lot of people; they’re so divorced from our everyday lives that we don’t perceive that type of danger as a threat to us. In contrast, the other movie is based a realistic situation that might affect us.
- Historical fiction is another way to step out of our current concerns and into an era in which none of these things existed. Despite the many hardships that people faced in different periods of history, they still feel like a better time and place where we have the opportunity to take a break from our own problems.
- There’s nothing like Fantasy or Science Fiction to pull readers and ourselves out of our own lives and into a different world. This is an extension of my first point above. These stories are neither in the present era nor in the present world, so the conflict feels removed from our own lives. So much so that it’s like a breath of fresh air. We all need that sometimes.
In each of these, we have the opportunity to create a world we would want, with the type of conflict we’d all choose: conflict that our characters can conquer in the end. This gives us all that balance and perspective so that we don’t become overwhelmed by negativity.
Cherish Beauty
Lastly, it helps my creative mind when I refresh it by enjoying something beautiful. I mentioned the YouTuber at the beginning of this post. Jonna creates beautiful videos filled with captivating shots of nature in her native, northern Sweden. Her channel is an exercise in appreciating and exploring the world around us.
For deep intuitive types like myself, getting out into nature and experiencing something lovely and tangible can be a huge benefit. This can include choosing to do something charming like heading out to a pumpkin patch, or taking a weekend to get away to a cabin deep in a snow-filled forest, or taking a drive into the country to have a picnic by a lake, or just spending the day baking. Anything lovely that celebrates what is good in the world.
This is really a matter of recharging so that when we return to the page, we have the emotional energy to create. There’s something about beauty and the wonder of the world around us that gives artists like ourselves a longing to create our own small garden of magic on the page.
But most importantly, it helps to unplug from the news and social media most of each day. I’m not much of a social media person, but I do like to keep tabs on several independent news outlets. And frankly, there isn’t much that’s positive in these sources. I think it’s important to know what’s going on, but it’s also important to keep my mind and soul healthy. I need boundaries and balance. And to have these, I have to be very intentional about how much time I devote to these things and how often I include those other, beautiful influences in my life.
Conclusion
You may have noticed that the heart of each of these situations is not so much about writing, but rather perspective. It’s about keeping our minds focused on what is good and lovely, while not entirely neglecting reality. It’s about striving for balance and deliberately fostering a life of beauty and hope.
Whatever helps you the most, I hope that you find joy and peace in the midst of your creative process. Let me know what fuels your ability to create and to stay positive! I’d love to hear what gives you energy and happiness.
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