Cynicism and Hope

In the last blog, I talked about the writing process as being a way of dealing with adversity, although I must confess that I have not always thought about it in this way. I cringe when I think about my first year in college and English Composition. The focus wasn’t on creativity, but upon spelling the word correctly and using correct punctuation. I’m sure I have used much of what was drilled in me, but I believe it would have been more helpful if there had been an equal focus on what I was writing, not just how I was writing it. Graduate school allowed me to heal my old wounds from English Composition and to begin to understand that perhaps I had some talent when it came to being able to translate psychological concepts and theories into language that most people could understand. This type of writing came easy for me and I have done a considerable amount of it over the years. Writing fiction did come easy for me. My first attempt in this area was Reaching Home, which was published in 2006. What went into the story were themes of resilience and, as the title implies, finding or, more correctly, creating a home for ourselves that is not a location or a geographical place, but is a place that we create within ourselves. Over the past three years, I have been working on a follow-up to Reaching Home. I anticipate it will be published by the end of this year. First Night focuses on the conflict between cynicism and hope. Both Reaching Home and First Night reflect the times in which they were written. I began writing Reaching Home just after 911. A major focus of the novel was our struggle as a society to conquer fear and our obsession with terrorism. First Night, which I began writing during the early years of the Great Recession focuses on realities that we continue to deal with daily, a Congress that remains deadlocked, an economy supposedly “recovering” — although some days it would be hard to know that — a nation whose trust in government is at a new all-time low and a political process that is increasingly controlled by big money and large corporations. But there are glimmers of hope, as there always are. Cynicism does not have to drown hope. The dark does not have to swallow the light. More about cynicism and hope in the next blog. by Ron Breazeale