Anger vs Attitude

We were supposed to write a piece with 'attitude' this week. Here's what it said in our brief ...

Attitude
or
What Makes You Write? What Makes Them Read?

For me, anger is the motivating force — it makes me decide what I want to write and how to write it. Others might call it energy. Others might call it ... whatever they want. Let's stick with 'anger' ans a catch-all term.

... write a piece this week which is imbued with anger — the result of which will be the attitude we have been talking about. It might be political anger (the erosion of civil liberties), it might be sociological anger (why are there so few lollipop ladies, it might be the way people strike you (always moaning instead of being happy) ...

You'd think that this would have been a friggin' cakewalk for me, as I've done little except tell Larry that everyone we see or hear needs "to shut the f*ck up."

His response is that I need to seriously change my attitude: something I've been hearing from authority figures for, oh, about forty-three years now. Maybe it's time to go back on the Lexapro express.

Anyhow, after three or four drafts over the past week, I couldn't get past writing anything, fiction-wise, that just didn't sound like a rant to me. And last time I had a bit of a rant in a story, I got feedback that my character was too bitchy. This was a week after I was told by yonder tutor to paste these words over my computer: "Don't be nice. Don't be fair."

I guess I haven't found the happy medium yet.

We'll see what happens Tuesday night, when the comments come in.