Read a magazine article that said if I wanted to be published in 2022 I needed to write for 2022. But what if I don’t want to write for a complete dumpster fire where nothing means anything anymore?

Read a magazine article that said if I wanted to be published in 2022 I needed to write for 2022. But what if I don’t want to write for a complete dumpster fire where nothing means anything anymore?

Seriously, what does that mean? It was in one of those lists of writing suggestions and really offered no further explanation. All I know is that reading that made my entire body convulse. To paraphrase a line from the classic film Sabrina, “2022? I could pick a better year out of a hat blindfolded.” (Okay, for this example I suppose every year in the hat needs to be before November 2016)

I suppose one of the things they’re trying to say is that to be published today you need to write for today’s audience, which, yes, of course that’s always true. However, the way I take that is to lean into all of the darkness, highlight the worst aspects of humanity, sensationalize it, and throw it in the audiences faces, because that’s so much of what seems to be coming out these days and that people are feeding off of. Whenever we open up Hulu, for example, that first main advertisement is always for some terribly dark serial killer show or death cult, or something along those lines. And I get that people eat that stuff up, but that’s not what I want to do with my work – a terrified populace feeds off of fear and the more fear mongering that’s out there, the more terrified that audience will become, the worse things will get. Indeed, I can’t remember the episode, but it was a Huberman Labs podcast where he spoke of how science has shown that human fear essentially is contagious.

So, isn’t it better to try to break that cycle? Not with some Hallmark Channel fluff that has no substance to it – (nothing wrong with indulging in that occasionally, I’m not trying to knock it, but, like the preponderance of super dark shows it’s just another extreme) – but a balance of substance, depth, experimentation, and hopefully a note of hope, no matter how small.

Does this sound obnoxious? Probably, and if so I’m sorry for that, but I, like everyone else, is just trying to figure out a way forward in a world that specifically aims to keep my anxiety and fear spinning. It’s like the Buddha said so many years ago – find the middle way. For so much of my life I lived in extremes, figuring that if I wanted to experience the highest highs, then I just had to put up with the lowest lows, but what kind of way is that to live? Ultimately not a healthy one, but one that I think the great majority of us are in.

Ah, I see I’ve come a long way from writing, so let’s try to get back to that with the idea of trying to get published in 2022. All of my favorite authors are from the 1920s Lost Generation. Theirs was a generation that experienced, for the first time ever, essentially what we call modernity, including the modernity of the most brutal forms of war and destruction. Those writers tried to make sense of an extremely changed world, and I think in many ways we’re still trying to do exactly the same thing.

Is there a way to try to make sense of 2022 without just giving into the dark impulses and sensationalism that surround us? I believe so, and I believe there is certainly an audience out there for that, but many of whom are stuck in this cycle of fear and trauma. Can we write our way out of it? Perhaps not, but it certainly can go a long way in getting us to look up from the deep, dark hole that we’ve dug ourselves into, and see that there indeed is light above and a way out.