Word-Need and the Power of Frustration by Catherine Warren

Word-Need and the Power of Frustration

Catherine Warren (aka Blue Stocking-Reads)

Writing comes from frustration, need, and desire. And if you feel a passionate urge to compose a comment arguing with my statement -- well, you just proved my point.

How many times have you retold a story the way it should have gone in real life? Or given a character in a story the power you wish you'd had yourself? Put the perfect words into someone's mouth to compensate for that time you were left without a word to say, or just written because something inside told you that you needed to?

Writing is the craft of eliciting emotion in others, using nothing greater, and nothing less, than our words. It is a burden and a challenge, and because it can be so difficult, it is a challenge we would not take up unless we were compelled to do so by some great need.

I've written because it was needed to pass a class, or because I wanted to imagine that I was understood, if only by someone imaginary.

I've written from frustrated love. If I can't have that person, at least I can write about what might have been, or write words passionate enough to melt through that icy wall of indifference. (Does it work? Sometimes.)

I've written from frustrated anger. The world is filled with injustice, cruelty, and caprice that is screamingly obvious to anyone paying any attention.

I've written from frustrated sadness, in an effort to make sense out of a senseless thing. After my grandfather fell while picking blackberries and lay undiscovered and alive for days before dying of pneumonia, I wrote of a Valkyrie that came to him and carried his spirit to the place where good Norwegian-American cattle ranchers go after they die. How I wished that were true.

The common thread for me has been frustration -- the sense that the world is not as it should be, that something is wrong. And my inner juno (as a woman, I have a "juno" instead of an inner "genius") tells me that writing something down isn't a luxury -- it's a need.

The word "frustration" comes from the Latin "frustratio," whose first definition is "a deception or trick." Naturally when we have been tricked -- when things are not the way they ought to be -- we feel frustrated and disappointed (the second definition).

Frustrated by the universe's tricks and deceptions, we perform a trick of our own: a sleight of hand, a deception practiced upon our willing readers. We take up the pen, or open a program, and we weave words into a spell to mend the cosmos.

The Old English "nēod" means "desire." A writer's fundamental need is for her stories to be heard, even if only by an imaginary reader. Even if your story doesn't have a happy ending, the act of putting it down can be the fulfillment of your need.

The next time you feel frustrated and uncomfortable with how-things-are, thank your inner genius (or juno!) that you are impelled to use words to create how-things-should-be. Thank your juno that you still have plenty of fuel for that internal bonfire that takes sadness, anger and fear and transforms them into something unimaginable.

Catherine is one of the authors who will be featured in our January issue of Penumbra.