What Makes Me Want To Write?

I try not to post on back to back days but sometimes the Real World rears its ugly head to prevent one from completing the task one has set for for the day.

Translation: Blog was on the fritz and my tolerance level for the Internet reached an all-time low.

Today's post is something special, in that topic of choice was not originally chosen by me, but for me. This past week I was suffering from a severe case of blog writer's block, so I had put out a call on thread that I participate in, on Topix's Top Stories forum, asking for suggestions on what I could talk about. I got a few, and as promised, I will give credit where credit is due. The topics of the next two posts were suggested to me by a poster called "micah" who formerly hails from Manchester, CT.

Thanks "micah".
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Well, to really answer that question, I will have to go back to 2006, a year that I would really like to forget about. That year, I went through a major whammy of sorts, in that I was going through a ton of personal problems, stress brought on by said problems and burnout at work. In a nutshell, I was a nut.

So in order to work through this crisis of nuttiness (which lasted until Spring 2007), I started to write. My original intent was to write a short story, but that intention quickly blew up as the words simply came pouring out of me. Within a few short months, I had a first draft of a 200 page novel written.

This particular draft of the novel has been described to me, from the various people who I've shown this to, as being incredibly angry, dripping with hostility and contempt. And they're right to a certain degree.

Due to the problems I was having then, I had an incredible amount of anger, which in turn sparked my writing. My output for 2006 was quite large: three very long (35+ pages) short stories, one 22 page short story, one 15 page short story, and one 25 page story in which I had written myself into a corner. In essence, I wrote when I was angry.

Anger was my motivation. Angry about work, angry about my personal life, angry about my friendships (or the complete sabotage of a few), you name it, I was angry. My writing became quite dark, almost to the point of bleakness. I couldn't write anything happy even if I wanted to. My anger simply poured out my mind and through my hands. Every single one of my stories had some type of bad ending: suicide, murder-suicide, accidental death. If they lived at the end, then humiliation was the key finish.

By the late Spring of 2007, major changes happened in my life, which unfortunately has affected my writing. In 2007, I had repaired my friendships in the Real World, discovered chat rooms, fixed the rest of my personal problems and got rid of my anger issues. Unfortunately, getting rid of my anger issues has put a major cramp in my writing.

I did manage to start another novel by fleshing out one of my short stories. This one will be similar to my first one as there will be two dueling plot lines throughout the book, which will come together at the end. And I did write a very clean family oriented short story, which I posted here about month or so ago.

Overall though, getting rid of the anger has created some unfortunate problems....