About sadness, fear and Art
I think a lot about emotions, when I’m writing.
I’m not very disciplined with my novel and I need to work on it; but writing here and reading authors I didn’t know before is helping a lot.
So, what did I teach myself along the way, this time?
I wrote two articles, lately. One was ‘Saudade’, a Portuguese word that is a combination of sadness and joy about good memories. It’s a mixed feeling.
Sadness is a beautiful emotion, unless it leads you to depression. So I’m talking about ‘healthy sadness’, and I know those two words combined look a lot like an oxymoron.
We feel sad when we need to elaborate something. Sadness makes you more aware of the world surrounding you. This comes from our subconscious: when we’re happy, we don’t really want to change our mood. We get fooled easily. When we’re sad, the opposite happens: we hope our mood will change soon, and we pay attention to the details. If you’re an artist, when you’re sad try to isolate yourself (if in nature, even better) for a bit. You don’t have to avoid people who want to help you: let them help you. Look out for them, ask for help. But if you manage to accept the sadness you’re feeling, you’ll see: you will notice the beauty in the world. I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but it always happens to me. If you’d read my ‘Saudade’, you’d see I’m just describing a dawn. But is a dawn full of details. The key, for me, is just accepting what I’m feeling as if I was swimming in my own mind.
I guess all emotions are connected in a way we often struggle to see. After sadness, in my experience, it comes fear.
Writing the piece on the Ochlocracy, I saw how fear is not exactly an artist’s best friend. You have to choose carefully the words you’re writing, more than usual: when you’re experiencing fear, your rational mind leaves the room. I chose the word “grotesque”, in the title, on purpose: it’s horror, but with a touch of humor. Fear is an useful emotion too, of course: they all are. It tells you there’s something wrong and you need to do something about it. It comes from our survival instinct, as humans. Lately it seems we’re all turning into lemmings, but anyway.
When you’re an artist, fear usually leads you to insane perfectionism: I was a bit shocked, when I realized the Wiki links I added didn’t match the Italian Wiki content. At all. It happened yesterday, in the evening. But it would mean editing again the piece I was already editing since two days before. I almost did it, then I realized it was no-sense: the message was clear already, and I had to let it go. It’s not perfect, but perfection is utopia and perfectionism is an artist’s demon, sometimes.
Fear leads to rage, I guess. In writing Ochlocracy, I had a bad passive-aggressive tone I didn’t even realize I had. Thank God for my beta-readers.
The lesson I learned is again the same I learned before: the solution is discipline. Know yourself, master yourself, find your own ‘vibration’, if you’d like to call it so. Write with your voice. Don’t look for words you don’t own.
Are you scared you will be misunderstood? Write with your voice anyway. Failure is a good way to learn something. The best one.
Keep learning. Keep growing. Keep writing.
About the grotesque piece, I’ve erased it. I still believe in all I wrote, but I needed to kill my darlings, you know. I have to let that voice go. It’s not my real voice. It was anxiety talking. When you read me, always remember I’m practicing the stream of consciousness for the novel I’m trying to get published.
