What a wonderful, empowering session we had with Venita Coelho! In her signature energetic, passionate style, she made us think about what makes us angry and how we can channel that anger.
Inspiration is often quite useless because we have to sit around waiting for it. It’s out of our control, and because it’s totally unreliable.
What works instead? Anger.
It’s powerful, it’s honest, and it shows us the way.
With short exercises and examples of great writers who’ve used their anger to create brilliant, memorable works of literature, we started writing. What I appreciated most was the emphasis on the fact that we don’t all have to write stories. How will we convey what we want to say while also being entertaining? Do we make reels? Rap songs? Cartoons? Comics? They’re all forms of storytelling!
We spoke of Dickens and Orwell, Saadat Hasan Manto and Arundhati Roy. But the main takeaway was this: in addition to getting angry and wanting to get people to listen, we must entertain. We must have a plan–a clever plan to sneak our agenda into our writing without being preachy and moralising.
If you know what you’re mad about, choose your weapon, and go forth and write!
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