Hate Kills Writing

I was recently very inspired to write a screenplay and was very excited about this new project, but I’ve run into a roadblock. The problem is that the characters are based on me and a man, and in the course of writing it, I became so filled with hate, hostility, contempt for him that I couldn’t continue. He was coming out as some kind of ridiculous caricature. And I now can’t talk to him in real life because that hate is real and was there all along and I can no longer push it aside. Quite amazing the way the act of writing something down can make you see things differently. But it also made me realize that writing which is fueled by hate doesn’t work. I tried it once before with a novel, and actually completed the novel, but it was a shit novel. And now that all the hate from that long-ago scenario is long gone, I don’t even find the story interesting. I don’t know that I will ever go back and revise it into something good. So, hate = bad writing, bad stories. I’ve had much more success writing with love.

But I don’t have any of that right now for this person, so this story will have to wait. I’m trying to kill him with every word, and that doesn’t make for good writing.

Hipsters Aren’t So Bad

Williamsburg is growing on me. I always hated it before, and the 12-block stretch of Bedford near the Subway is still a disgusting hipster boardwalk, but I’m here on my own this weekend and somehow exploring it myself makes me see it with different eyes. Also I took the Chinatown bus directly to Williamsburg and was dropped off near the bridge, in a very immigrant-y area, so I see that the entire neighborhood isn’t completely gentrified. And walking from there to my friend’s apartment, where I’m staying alone while they are out of town, the hipster quotient of course increased, but I could still see the structure of the old Williamsburg; the backbone is still there. The Columbian bakeries, the tiny immigrant-owned grocery stores, etc. Also the spas, the hipster coffee shops and bars etc., but somehow seeing it in that order, that progression, made it less offensive to me. And now I might even say I like it.