“The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth wrote. All of 2026 replies in unison, “No shit.”
Everything in your feed is violent, discouraging, and makes you want to scream. So do it. Go find a place where you can be alone and give a good yell. Or open your window or go up to your rooftop like in the movie Network. I’m ready to shout out of all my windows. Because we have limits, and it’s really hard to write in chaos. It’s hard to do anything in chaos.
And yet—people do and always have. How?
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “I Have a Dream” speech in a hotel the night before delivering it in front of 250,000 people. He only had eight minutes to speak. In eight minutes, he delivered the most iconic speech of the twentieth century, cobbled together in a hotel lobby and partly ad-libbed. Even after his speeches were typed and mimeographed, there would be notes written all over the margins. As a press copy of the speech shows, the refrain of “I have a dream” itself was improvised.
But he had a clear purpose, as a leader and activist. The purpose of a novelist, story writer, or memoirist is sometimes more abstract. When the news and world events are tough to process, going into an imaginative space can feel...selfish. Not enough. Yes, I know it is important work and we do mirror our social values and our politics in our stories, even when they’re fantastical ones or based in other worlds.
So how can we make an agreement with chaos? Put it on hold for one hour to give ourselves time to go into a different headspace? You can’t even wrap the world in a blanket and lay it down like a baby in a crib, then tiptoe out of the room. Or can you?
Try telling the world, I’ll be back in one hour. Saying that to my partner when I was a new mother saved my life.
See what you can write without judgment of yourself or your reasons for doing so. Allow yourself a tiny escape from everything that has been screaming and fighting for your attention.
Try writing differently than you usually do:
Write before you look at a newsfeed or social media.
Write in longhand and see if the personal format gives you more freedom.
Speak into a recorder or voice memo as a way to write.
And if your fire is truly lit and you want to channel your mad-as-hell energy, then I would challenge you to sit down and scrawl out something entirely new—something based in this now that we are in. A poem, a story, an essay, a tirade. Don’t worry about whether it is good enough. Write something you’re worried you’ll regret. Even if it does not change the world, it may change you.