Writing Instead of Anger

I used to work for a software company as a technical editor. One particularly awful day, I got so angry during a meeting that I thought my head would explode. Right after the meeting I put on my jacket and walked across the street to Dows Lake, fought my way into a thicket, leaned my head against a tree, and cried for a while. What bothered me even more than the situation was that I couldn’t let go of it. I knew I was overreacting and it scared me.

Riding the bus home that night, I was still thinking over what the coworker had said that made me angry, coming up with snappy responses, my pulse rate going up, and I thought, what could I possibly do to get this crap out of my head?

And it occurred to me that I could try to understand this woman, try to empathize. What were her fears? What did she want? I started working on a character like my coworker, and mulled it all over quite happily for the rest of the night. What a relief to turn the obsession into creativity. I found I couldn't be angry when my mind had seized on the pleasant work of imagination.

The next day when I went to work, I no longer cared about the situation that had made me so upset. I was much more interested in the new story I was working on. And instead of reacting to my coworker, I observed her with compassion.

I was reminded of this episode when reading a post by James Scott Bell, called Write, Don't Fret:

Dennis Palumbo is a former screenwriter (My Favorite Year) turned psychiatrist--a shrink who specializes in writers! Talk about your never-ending fount of clients, especially in Hollywood. Anyway, he has a nice little book called Writing From the Inside Out on the "mental game" of writing. He says in there, "An hour spent writing is an hour spent not fretting about your writing."

Indeed.