Whenever I get into these writing ruts, I typically try to rely on news to find things or topics that spark ideas or inspiration to write about. Sometimes it’s local news, sometimes national, and sometimes worldly news. The thing is, I’m looking for anything to spark a train of thought, and help me break the chains of a writer’s block.
Lately, even that’s been difficult, and I find myself sitting around feeling frustrated by the world at being so inadequate at providing me with inspiration, because everything I read is so downtrodden, depressing, and way too accommodating to the notion that if it bleeds, it leads.
Reading about local Atlanta news, it’s the same stories every day, of shootings here, shootings there, robberies in this place, car-jackings in that place. And/or political corruption, or news that is so blatantly justifying towards the ideas that the people that run Atlanta, and the State of Georgia are about as crooked as cracks in the sidewalk.
So I look at sites like CNN, and look for news from a larger scope. Bombings here, riots there, beheadings out in the Middle East, dear leader murdering people for no good reason out in North Korea, and then I just want to close my eyes and imagine a world where everyone weren’t so fixated on the tragic and gruesome as they are now. I know I’m a pretty cynical person, but every now and then I prefer to not be so bombarded by horrific news from every single outlet, at every single level.
What’s sadder is that attempting to counteract how shitty the world is by seeking out positive stories, or stories where the point isn’t death, crime, corruption, or any other reminder of how shitty the human race is, is a very difficult undertaking. For every positive link clicked, where strangers help strangers, a father and son that take the same picture every year for 27 years, there are ten more where people are getting killed, and/or agenda-driven writing attempting to sway people into become bigger racists or greedier than any person should really be.
It’s times like this I wish to close all the windows and doors to the rest of the world, and try to live my own life in my own little space, but it’s often impossible to tune everything out, when you kind of need to have your eyes and ears open in order to function and be productive and contribute to the movement of said world.
Perhaps all this drivel is on account of the fact that I still somewhat feel like I’m in a rut. Perhaps it’s because I’m not sleeping as well as I could be, and it’s on account of some fatigue. Maybe my brain is just stagnant, which is why I’m having such difficulty in finding the motivation to write about anything other than frustrated feelings, instead of things that I have been thinking about how amusing they’ve been, like the state of professional wrestling, or television shows I’ve been watching like True Detective and House of Cards.
But it certainly doesn’t help when the world around you is just so constantly portrayed to be such a shitty place full of depressing tragic stories.
