Writing, Ranting and Rage as the Days Go By

There are five or six unfinished rage-drenched  blog posts sitting on the laptop right now. Some are just too incoherently furious to publish, others are about what was awful last week but has been diminished by the horrors of this week. To think I once fancied being an op-ed columnist…

There have been points where it wasn’t as difficult to divert fury into fiction: quite early on in my writing life I remember telling a friend that my best work seemed to happen when I was in a rage about something, even though I mostly write erotica. Fiction, though, involves more filters than non-fiction, whether it’s as simple as creating a character that (however much you might have altered the physical characteristics in your descriptions) is the person you are furious with… and then meting out as many horrible sufferings as you can dream up to your fictitious voodoo doll, or whether it’s building and then destroying a world similar to the one that has displeased you.

Most of the Brexit book was written in a state of rage – though the last story in the collection is a little more optimistic. Back then, though, there were points when a new idea would be rapidly superceded by something else previously unthinkable taking place. And then, of course, the whole damn thing got completely and utterly Joplinned about six weeks after publication.

Some writers are struggling to write at all under current conditions. Some people believed at the start of the lockdown that now would be the opportunity to write their first novel, and some may well be doing a superlative job of that: we will have to wait and see. I find I have no inclination to produce any topical filth, but a part of me is contemplating the big non-fiction project, and I have something of an inclination to go back to the unfinished steampunk novel I was tinkering with a while ago. How’s all this sort of thing working out for the rest of you?

If you want something to take your mind off it all, why not have a browse in the bookshop before you go?