Writing with a Clenched Fist

Here’s my confession: I am an angry person.

I don’t mean that I have uncontrollable rages or snap viciously at waitpersons and store clerks. I’m actually rather nice that way—I recently found myself comforting the sobbing teenager who’d rear-ended my car, leaving it totaled. (“At least no one was hurt,” I said, patting her arm maternally and staring glassy-eyed at my irreparably damaged Honda).

When I say I’m angry, I’m not talking about rage, but about a low-level, simmering ire that can linger unresolved for decades, unfazed by age and time, distance and death. I’ve never gotten over being ticked-off at my high school gym teacher. I’m perennially mad at several members of my extended family. I’m angry at the con artist in Modesto who sold me my Nissan. At people who force wild animals to do tricks in circuses. At most of my former boyfriends. And, of course, at my mother—which only proves that anger and love can dwell in the same space.

I’m confessing my anger here as a way of leading into the role of anger in writing. And, perhaps, to delay writing about it—because that role is so complex and controversial and full of landmines.

Our culture has a complicated relationship to anger. There’s no denying we’re a ticked-off lot. Look at the online comments posted next to any news item. Listen to political ads. Check out a few crime statistics—or simply consider what we find humorous and entertaining. It’s clear a lot of us are angry a lot of the time.

Yet, despite this pervasive rage—or maybe because of it—we continually promote the notion that anger is to be avoided at all cost. Hundreds of articles are printed every year telling us how damaging anger is to our health, our hearts, and our spirits. We are continually admonished to forgive those who’ve offended us. Self-help gurus get rich telling us how to rid ourselves of anger, as if it were something we could shed, like excess weight or poorly applied mascara.

But, for writers, anger isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it can be a powerful motivator and the source of tremendous creative power. Use it right, and it can inspire you, energize you, and keep you focused. It can also give your writing a keen edge.

“You might be surprised to discover how many apparently mild-mannered writers harbor furious demons,” writes Ralph Keyes in A Writer’s Book of Hope. Keyes sites Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow, who admitted he started writing simply to get back at his brother, and National Book Award finalist Mary Gaitskill, who talks about being driven by “an angry little engine that could.” D. H. Lawrence wrote that he liked to write when he felt spiteful. And William Gass, whom Keyes calls “the troubadour of rage,” said that he had to be angry to produce his best work. “Anger is good,” writes Anne Lamott in Grace (Eventually). “A bad attitude is excellent.”

When you consider the quality of these writers’ work, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that anger can stimulate good writing. That maybe we should relish our rages and furies and dark, mean days, ignore the pop-psych focus on forgiving and forgetting, and stop trying to find that peaceful place inside. Maybe we should acknowledge our anger, communicate with it, touch, see, feel, and smell it—and put it to work.

In his classic work, On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner wrote: “There is no wrong motive for writing fiction.” If anger is what gets you to sit down and pen that poem, complete your novel, write the story of your life, or get started on the essay you’ve had in your head for five years, then why would you want to stifle it?