Write Angry

“I write [ ] because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

George Orwell

In the world of writing, it’s fair to say that the simple way to get by, play safe and stay comfortable is to write about something commonplace, that’s talked about too often — Write something about the Law of Attraction. Just put things in different words.

It’s the same in other mediums too.

Observe the greatest artists and you’ll find that in plenty of cases, they wanted to be revolutionary — They wanted to be different. And one of the ways to do that would be to articulate on a matter that not many people have the courage to voice out about — Because it’s scary, because there might be a lot of sacred cows that you have to slay in getting your message across. People might hate you and call you ugly names in the short-term. Don’t be surprised — It’s human nature, we would do anything to resist change until we experience for ourselves the good that it brings. And that may take a very long time, but it doesn’t matter if you know the lasting impact you want to have on the world.

“Writing angry” doesn’t mean you have to get your face red and turn into Donkey Kong while you’re typing on your keyboard. You write “angry” in the sense that you’re puzzled about why very few people have taken on the subject that you’re trying to write — Why, when it’s a very important piece of knowledge for us to know, yet it has always been shrinked from common reach.

When Robert Greene first published The 48 Laws of Power, people thought he was a psychopath — They couldn’t fathom why one man would dedicate an exhausting amount of research and pack it all into what seemed to be a super dense book about how to manipulate others. The last person to write about these things was Machiavelli from hundreds of years ago.

They were wrong anyway, or to put it in another way, they misunderstood the idea of the book. The book isn’t about manipulation, rather it’s about seeing the world as it is — Acknowledging that not everyone is nice, that human beings aren’t as simple as you think they are, honing your strategic mind to think with realism and clarity, and training yourself to let go of emotional battles that just don’t actually mean anything much if you were to see from a vantage point of the future.

Greene has often said that he writes from a place of worry — He worries about what might happen to us as people, as time and technology advance. In writing his book Mastery, for example, he was worried that we might come to not knowing the value of mastering a craft or a skill, or that we might ignore our calling and talents in life — Since that is where true lasting success stems from.

In writing his recent book, The Laws of Human Nature, he was worried that we are becoming increasingly self-absorbed as social media takes over, that we can’t think outside our own worlds — We don’t want to understand others, and we don’t know how.

So why do you write? From what place in your heart does your writing come from?