Many of my friends, both those who are writers and those who are not, feel overwhelmed these days. While the stock market rises and falls and the threat of war moves ever closer, quite a few have become news junkies, clinging to every scrap of information in a futile attempt to predict the future. Others have given up hope – and writing along with it. "What’s the use of sitting at the computer, turning out another story when the world’s going to go up in smoke?" one complained.
Her words provoked thoughts of Anne Frank, and I wondered how the world might be different today had she given up. I thought of Viktor Frankl making meaning from the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Ernest Hemingway writing his way through the Spanish Civil War came to mind as did John Steinbeck who made story to make sense of the Great Depression. What if they hadn’t used hard times as the catalyst that triggered their powerful voices to emerge? What if they had muttered, "What’s the use?" and used their circumstances as an excuse to avoid writing?
I suspect that this time of uncertainty, fear and anger is precisely the moment when our skills as writers are the most useful – to ourselves, to those around us and to the broader world. Of all people, we have the ability to look at the seemingly chaotic events unfolding around us in order to see the truths that lie hidden inside them. Of all people, we are most suited to coax out those insights, to refine and polish them and hold them up for to see and to benefit from seeing.
As writers, perhaps our most potent power is our ability to look at an event and clearly comprehend the themes that drive it. The themes we’re seeing these days are the big ones – power and powerlessness, corruption and integrity, good and evil, pride and humility and (apologies to Tolstoy) war and peace. Even though these themes can be overwhelming, they are also extremely interesting and can pull some very deep writing from us if we allow it to happen.
When I was a child, one of my favorite stories was Rumpelstiltskin. I wasn’t interested much in the young woman who eventually married the king, but I was fascinated by the little man who helped her by spinning straw into gold. Growing up on a farm, I had intimate knowledge that there is nothing more humble than straw. Straw is animal bedding used to cushion the barn floor and catch manure. It stinks. I knew we spread it on our fields to fertilize future crops, but the notion that it could be transformed even further into gold inspired me. Although spinning straw into gold is messy business, it can be done. It needs to be done.
We writers have a straw spinner inside of us. The spinner is the part of us that notices the deeper meanings of the things that happen around us. It is our sensitivity and our sense of injustice. As in the fairy tale, unless we name and thereby acknowledge our internal straw spinner, it turns out to be a curse rather than a blessing. Although it may not claim our firstborn child, it steals our peace of mind and imprisons us in anxiety.
What’s the use? Plenty.
What would happen if, instead of bemoaning the fact that we may not get to retire when we’re 65, we worked the security vs. insecurity issues into a story? What if we wrote about the theme of feeling out of control? What if we used this time of fear to start deeply exploring the nature of fear in an essay? What if you were the one to write a short story about a person so afraid that he used plastic and duct tape to make an air-tight cocoon and suffocated? What if you went searching for the love and the grace and the hope in these times and sent back reports from the field?