Look Back in Anger

Am I able to write well only when writing from anger? The last couple of posting have not been that great, not compelling, not sparkling and it's because I didn't feel any anger when I was writing them.  My frustrations at waiting tables is stale, haven't felt it for months so its not deep enough to vividly paint anything but a twice-removed bystander's remarks.  Ditto for my posting on remembering my childhood Christmases.  Being that they were the time of the year when things were good, I don't have the acrid taste of injustice and heavy tears in my throat as I write and therefore I feel the writing is weak and flimsy and does nothing to me or the reader.  

A piece I wrote several years back that I think of as some of my best work was written with fresh, juicy judgement and disdain and that emotion carried me through eight pages before I got distracted----- or happy.  Do I have the power to pull out strong prose without the fresh smart of pain to push me on?  I don't want to be unhappy my whole life, is that what it takes to be a great writer?  What a cliche!    I was terribly happy in undergrad and wrote some really strong and vibrant essays.  Perhaps the emotion doesn't have to be negative, just there.  My fears about needing to be angry to write well are perhaps just another attempt to make an excuse why not to write.

I dream of having the time, the passion, the commitment to keep going, beyond eight pages, deep into a story and create so many words and images and characters and situations that get you right there that it becomes a book.  This longing to create more than a few pages feels the same as when I am deeply lonely, or when I was thirty and felt that I must have a child or I would die.  I want to go away somewhere alone and lock myself up with the computer and let it all gush out of me.

But then there is the fear that it wouldn't gush, that it is now and always will be only a trickle.  The fear that I am a dabbler, the horrid word, dilettante, and not a true writer, that I don't have enough to sustain a novel.  Since I was a young adult, I always said my worst fear was to be mediocre.  I would rather fail miserably than be mediocre.  Perhaps this partially explains my choice in men.  Mediocrity was synonymous with the suburbs, with "normalcy," with pre-fab creativity and store-bought uniqueness, with men that were nice and kind and boring in bed.

I panic when I think of this "thing" that I have never done.  I feel plagued by it.  Since third grade, I have heard it, "You should write!"  I want to do it, I want to write, but I am so afraid of it not being good, and then what will I fall back on as my reason for being, for the great thing I want to yet attain in life?   "You should take your writing seriously."  I am afraid to take my writing seriously because if I do, and I fail, if it sucks, or worse, is mediocre, then what am I left with?  If I keep putting it off, pushing aside those cunning little phrases that lodge themselves in my brain when I am driving and demand to be noted down, if I keep making up excuses not to write as I have for decades now, then I will never know, and maybe that is better.  Maybe the bittersweet, "I coulda been" is better than the conclusive, cold, hard  "I am not."