Writing about what upsets you...

So, I'm a member of this site called www.litreactor.com.  It used to be the Chuck Palahniuk fan club site -- but now it's morphed into something a little more general about writing, workshops.  You can submit your work, review others -- take online classes - and read essays by people... a bunch of them by Mr. Palahniuk himself.

(for those who don't know, Chuck Palahniuk is the guy who wrote Fight Club... a bunch of other stuff too, but Fight Club is the one that put him on the map)

In one of his essays he talks about a bunch of tips for writers.  Today I'm talking about number twelve:

Number Twelve:

Write about the issues that really upset you.  Those are the only things worth writing about.  In his course, called “Dangerous Writing,” Tom Spanbauer stresses that life is too precious to spend it writing tame, conventional stories to which you have no personal attachment.  There are so many things that Tom talked about but that I only half remember:  the art of “manumission,” which I can’t spell, but I understood to mean the care you use in moving a reader through the moments of a story.    And “sous conversation,” which I took to mean the hidden, buried message within the obvious story.  Because I’m not comfortable describing topics I only half-understand, Tom’s agreed to write a book about his workshop and the ideas he teaches.  The working title is “A Hole In The Heart,” and he plans to have a draft ready by June 2006, with a publishing date set in early 2007.