Red Room Where the Writers Are

Like many people, I never thought I'd live to see the day. An African-American man and his family headed for the White House. Now, it seems, this telegenic, bright and carefully considered person is going to govern our country which, if nothing else, will be a stark contrast to what we have come to know over the past 8 years.

Not only am I sitting at my computer, before my normal writing time, blinking, fighting the urge to pinch myself, wanting to laugh in that inappropriate and slightly insane away you get when you spend too much time alone, I feel something brand new and entirely foreign spreading through my body -- hope.

I'm an emotional person but not a sentimental one. I have a sarcastic and slightly dark sense of humor. I like to believe in the better parts of human beings, but rarely see them in action. And from personal experience, I can tell you one thing. There is nothing worse for a writer, or any kind of artist, than hope.

I'm reminded of a Patton Oswalt comedy routine, when he talks about falling in love -- and how his comedy becomes about rainbows and unicorns, not funny at all.

Conflict is crucial to good writing. And conflict stems from cruelty, from selfishness, from the belief that we're the most important beings on the planet. But I want to live my "real" life in the other world, where we're all nice to each other at the grocery store, take part in volunteering, and care about our communities.

Maybe that's why writers tend to hit the bottle. We exist in two worlds all the time. Maybe, as I work on my next book, I can live in the kind and newly hopeful world not by pretending that cruelty doesn't exist, but by being a force to help wipe it off the map. Maybe my words, along with the words of others, can help to bring light to that selfishness or, at the very least, my own life.