Got a Conflict? Write it.

Last week, someone called me a “dumb bitch” to my face. And by “to my face,” I mean on Facebook.

I was commenting with a few FB friends about the weather in Minnesota when someone—not an actual friend or even a FB friend, but a FB friend of a FB friend–posted a racist comment. Since I don’t believe in being silent in the face of evil, I quietly wrote that I was sorry the discussion had taken such a bad turn, and that I was deleting the thread from my page. I did, in fact, delete the thread. But not before my friend-of-a-friend posted a rage-fueled, all-caps rant directed at me and punctuated by the b-word.

I can’t remember the last time someone called me a “b” to me to my face, although I’m sure it happens when I’m not there to hear it, such as when I leave my turn signal on for 18 blocks. But all I could think of when I read it was: Now here’s something I can take home. Three things, in fact:

1.  How lucky I am. The people I hang with—and I mean literally ALL the people I hang with: friends, family, coworkers, neighbors—don’t blurt out racist comments, don’t think insults are the best way to make a point, and certainly don’t respond to disagreement with obscenity-lacked conniptions. When I was young, my parents told me that calling someone names was for “little kids” and now that I had reached the august age of 7, I was too old for such nonsense. Apparently, my friends all got the same lesson because that’s just not the way they talk. And yet, there are a lot of people out there who don’t know any other way to be in the world. And, worse yet, there are others who have to work with, spend Thanksgiving with, or—heaven forbid—be married to those types. Yikes!

2. What a great thing the Internet is for writers. It gets us out of our quiet little corners of the universe. It lets us talk to all sorts of people we’d never want to meet in real life. It keeps us in touch with those whose values are so starkly different from our own that you’d hardly know we were the same species, and it reminds each of us that the larger world isn’t the same as the smaller one we’ve constructed for ourselves, made up of people more-or-less like us.

3. You can use everything. The FB spat. The quarrel with a spouse. The confrontational meeting. The unfair boss. The conflict at work. The argument in the grocery store. Some day, I’ll write a story in which a man flies into a frenzy of rage over a disagreement, and out of his mouth will come dumb bitch, because that silly little incident, like everything else, got tucked away in my mental file cabinet, waiting to be used.

The short version: It’s all material.