It Turns Out Anger Isn’t Great For Writing Blog Posts

A brief and subpar essay on the non-transferability of negative emotions 😤

Woman Enraged by Pieter Huys (1560s). It’s so ridiculously ugly it cured some of my own anger with laughter!

I spent all day mired in annoying bugs. Software that didn’t run when it should. Delays, delays, delays. Requests for help that would go partially answered, such that the partial answer would feel like a temporary beacon of hope, to be immediately annihilated by reality when, inevitably, it would only partially work. It’s been a frustrating day.

At the same time I was trying to think of something to write about. I’d begun writing a post the previous night, but today it felt like a pretty dumb and pointless topic. So I tried to find something else. For most of the day that didn’t happen. Eventually I took a walk, thought of a topic, and wrote approximately half a post. It was dumber and pointlesser than the previous one. After a break for choir practice, I realized I had to give it up, douse it in gasoline, and burn it to the ground so that it is forever forgotten. (Just kidding I’m keeping it in my ever-expanding archive of unpublished drafts.)

Then I spent an hour doing other things and hoping for a better idea. No better idea ever came. Now it’s past 11pm and here we are. I’m writing a dumb and pointless post about frustration.

There’s a cliché that says artists must suffer to come up with great work. In my own limited experience, the reverse is true. I’m totally unable to write anything good when I’m sad, melancholy, upset, or depressed. Nor do I feel like I must traverse episodes of those emotions to later be able to write well.

Instead, the emotions that are conducive to good writing are all positive. The best one is excitement. When I’m excited about whatever, it’s very easy to get excited about something else, like an idea for a post. The energy from positive emotions are transferable.

The thing with frustration, or its fully formed cousin, anger, is that they’re active emotions, unlike the various flavors of sadness. So you’d naïvely think they can lead to creative problem-solving… and indeed they do, but only about the thing they’re focused on. Those bugs I was dealing with today have suffered my wrath (or will suffer it tomorrow when I get back to work). But the wrath had nothing to do with writing blog posts, so it’s just been draining my energy, forcing me to pay attention to something else — i.e. those stupid bugs.¹ Anger can be productive, but it’s not transferable. It’s obstinately fixated on whatever caused it in the first place.

Or at least so it goes for me. If that cliché above about negative emotions exists, it must be true to some extent. There must be many writers out there who have become masters at channeling their unhappiness towards productive ends, and quite frankly, good for them. When I’m sad or angry, I’m just sad or angry. No channeling occurs; I must wait for the cause to either get solved or forgotten — at which point I don’t want to write about it.

I suppose I’m lucky that I’m only rarely sad or angry. Otherwise I would never be able to maintain a weekly blog!

Anyway, that’s all the insight we’re getting for tonight. Sorry for the frustratingly terrible essay. I wish I had been able to write something good, so I’d at least go to bed feeling good about myself. I’ll console myself by looking some more at those ridiculous artistic depictions of anger I found.

Anger, from Charles Le Brun’s Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698, posthumous)

1. I am tempted to add a lot of swearing words to this sentence, but swearing in English doesn’t feel very natural to me, and inserting a string of Québécois sacres, while cathartic, would feel rather out of place.