Have you ever dwelled on imaginary arguments, workshopping the ultimate comeback? If so, welcome to the Angry Ruminators’ Club.
While most people see anger as a “bad emotion”, the truth is that emotions are a form of information. The question is what you do with the information.
You need to find a way to channel these emotions into the making of the work.
I used anger a lot as fuel for my work. Many times, I wrote about things that pisses me off -and most of my book are the result of these angry writing moments.
More than just “having ideas”, your anger can provide you the energy you need to see you through a creative project, and if you can identify that energy and where it comes from, it can help your work.
As Austin Kleon said,
“If we think of anger as a compost, we think of it as energy that can be recycled in the direction of our good [work]. It is an empowering force. You have to be angry and curious.
Whenever you are out of ideas, there’s someone, somewhere, with bad ideas that need to be corrected. But you don’t necessarily have to talk about the bad ideas, or take them on directly, you can just articulate the good ideas that cancel them out.”
Anger gives you direction, it gives you something to push against, something to defy. What you don’t want to be is every bit as important as what you do want to be.
How do you use your anger in your work?