I love writing. I hate writing. I love the ideas that compel me to create something. I hate those ideas when they hit a wall I cannot overcome.
I love words, and choosing the right word for the sentence. I hate words because no one has a decent vocabulary anymore.
I love fountain pens and love to write out plot lines using a well-weighted fountain pen. I hate fountain pens because ink is more expensive than gasoline and no one knows how to use fountain pens anymore.
I love space and futuristic themes. I hate space because the aliens should have come a long time ago and taken me elsewhere.
I love the atmosphere of a used bookstore. All those books that have been read, holding weight, a trove of ideas bleeding onto pages from well-worn writers. I hate used bookstores because I always buy more books than I want or need, and have to find a place at home to display them.
Buddhists talk about balance and finding a balance in life. It is not easy. To forgo extreme passion to avoid extreme hate, and there is a lot to hate these days. Stupidity, for one, is abundant as all that carbon they keep claiming is destroying the Earth. They do go hand in hand. Idiotic climate czars in their private jets spewing more pollution than I could make in a lifetime.
Ying/Yang: Breathe in/out. Live/die. We want balance everywhere but in our writing because there it would create a boring read. Good writing is borne of conflict and destruction of the ideal, enabling the hero to claw back to some semblance of that, although different. Change happens. Shit happens, but change happens more often.
I try not to hate. It is very counter-productive, counter-intuitive, and certainly counter to being healthy, let alone happy. Besides this, hatred merely fuels more hatred, attracts hatred and negativity, and never ends well.
But putting your head in the sand to avoid the negative news, negative politics, negative greed, and corruption, might spare you for a moment but makes you functionally useless when it comes time to save your family. You need information, good and bad, to be able to navigate the quagmire.
Social media hurts. If you are part of the ‘yes’ club, you are surrounded by the ‘yes’ people who will fan your need for approval and satisfaction. There is no rational discussion in the ‘yes’ club because no one wants to hear ‘no.’
Anyone not in the ‘yes’ club is automatically targeted because truth is irrelevant when compared to social justice. You know, repeat something enough times and everyone will believe it to be true. We live in a very conflicted time where truth is lost, fallacy is encouraged and delusions are adopted like a flag to wear proudly.
And somehow you are to write a work of fiction that is relevant, entertaining, and will avoid the endless social media barrage of haters who just disagree with you. When you see the responses to anything controversial (which means anything that isn’t woke) it makes you wonder whether it is worth the effort.
Take J.K. Rowling as an example: She should be entitled to her opinion even if you disagree. Her writings and her opinions are not the same. You can love the writing but dislike the author. But that was not enough; they had to destroy her. They had to smear her publicly across all media and take the power of publishing her work without her name because they hated her name.
Sadly, writing controversy used to be a good thing. Books that made you think, regardless of whether you agreed with them, allowed for strong discussion, excellent debates, and a better appreciation for the amount of work the author injected.
Salmon Rushdie who wrote a controversial book a few decades back, was stabbed in the throat by a lunatic who believed he had insulted Islam. It did not help that a fatwa had been placed on Rushdie by Iran’s supreme leader, and the attacker was merely complying.
When you read the headlines it sounds like people hate ideas that make them think. And, in part, that is because this generation has passed through an education system that does not make them think, does not want them to think; merely accept what they are told and obey what they are instructed to do.
If anything will be our downfall, ignorance is it.
So what are your thoughts on all this?