My Difficulties In Creating Positive Stories

Introduction

I have remarked on this situation many times since I started on Social Media and also since joining Vocal. When I post something positive, it is largely ignored, when I post something negative it is picked up on.

I recently posted an angry poem that I did not share outside of Vocal and that got six hearts in a few minutes. Its predecessor, a playlist based on a list shared by a close friend much earlier in the day had two and still only has four.

My issue is that a poem that just contained nothing but my anger, no formatting or presentation, was more attractive to readers than something that even I found interesting and very positive.

So How Does This Affect My Writing?

I like my work to be uplifting and make people feel better which is why I included this cover of the beautiful Jorma Kaukonen instrumental by Hana Jade Ulep in this piece. Play it. It is beautiful.

One of the problems I find in writing is that in every story there needs to be elements of jeopardy, unless it is a children's short story or a poem.

I have tried writing purely positive prose and found it very difficult because there are always elements that could go wrong. Think about Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", ask anyone and they will probably tell you that it is a love story, and that has to be positive doesn't it? Well they are members of two warring families and they both end up dead, so not so positive now. The thing is if you take out all the ill will between the Montagues and Capulets and the death of Romeo and Juliet then you don't have much of a story left.

My early writing on Vocal veered toward darkness and horror but then I tried a different direction with this series, I didn't realise there were seven stories that I had created (I could put them together in a book!):

This is all of them:

These also contained jeopardy and could not have been written without it.

I find it easy to write on dystopian themes because that is the society we live in. CCTV cameras are everywhere "for our protection" and while I am not too concerned, others are. Many of these cameras are in private houses as well.

This is the thing when you are writing fiction, you have so much darkness to work with and maybe not enough light.

When you write about factual situations then there is no need for jeopardy, especially when you are reporting on something positive. An example of this is my piece on the Lionesses before they won the Euro 2022 Final, because it was real life it was all positive:

Conclusion

I wake every morning and expect something really good to happen in my life, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, but I never wake up expecting bad things to happen.

I know bad things do happen, yesterday I saw a car accident, there was no ambulance so I assumed everyone was ok.

This morning I was walking towards the supermarket and saw a woman walking in my direction and she put something in her bag and I saw something drop on the floor. When I was closer I told her I thought she had dropped something, we walked back to the items and they were three bank cards and credit cards.

She was relieved and grateful and I felt that I had done something good for the day.

Real life can give you good things sometimes without the jeopardy needed for a piece of fiction.

Thank you for reading, I really appreciate your support.

T