Negativity can be a real bummer. Whether you’re putting it out, or on the receiving end of it by someone else, it drags you down. It’s a depression in the fabric of spacetime that, if not overcome, will collapse down into a singularity and suck the very life out of you.

Every day I battle with what I call the Negative Creeps, both from within and without. The Internet has enabled not only great ideas to be shared, but the detritus of humanity’s worst feelings to be easily communicated through those same channels. It’s lowered discourse in my own home country to the level of pointless bickering, name-calling, and divisiveness.

It used to be that it took a while for someone to slam you. Believe me, for every person out there that might like you, there’s a dozen others that are much more vocal and ready to beat you down for no other reason than you are there and are a ripe target because you (gasp) decided to express an opinion or offer some advice based on your own experience.

One has only to go to any major media outlet for the U.S. online and pick any story on there with comments and read through them. People calling each other “idiot”, using strawman arguments, ad hominem attacks, and so on. When did my fellow countrymen and women become so bitter, hostile, and mean toward each other?

There was always vitriol, but the level of it makes me wonder if we’ve forgotten about the pursuit of happiness in lieu of the pursuit of putting the other person down to try to make ourselves feel better and give ourselves an artificial (and delicate) perch to judge everyone else. It’s not discourse, it’s plain, old-fashioned arguing and yelling.

Earlier tonight it happened to me. They got in, those Negative Creeps. They sneak in through some random thought, something innocent-sounding. Gradually they eat up more and more cycles of your thought process until you have to stop everything you’re doing and deal with them.

It started with an e-mail, followed by a phone conversation. It wasn’t anything major I thought at the time, but over the course of an hour the Negative Creeps ate up more and more cycles in my head.

It went something like this:

NC: Why are you even bothering now doing all of this?
Me: What are you talking about?
NC: All this. You really think anyone truly gives a shit and reads what you write? Even this blog of yours?
Me: You might be right.
NC: Of course I’m right. I’m you. And you should listen to me more often. You ignored me for years while you did this whole “writer thing” and now this “filmmaker thing”. Don’t you think you’d be better off back in a 9-to-5 job?
Me: Dude, if I still had a 9-to-5 job I don’t think I would have ever been able to do what I do now. And I’d probably be dead.

That’s not an overexaggeration. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I was ordered by my doctors at the time to switch jobs because it was quite literally killing me. But that’s getting off-track and the subject of another post.

It took me a long time to learn to ignore the Negative Creeps whenever they came in and made themselves at home on the large, comfy couch in my head. It was self-doubt and insecurity given manifest form. I gave them all a unified voice to drag myself down, without anyone else’s help. It kept me from doing a lot of the things that most other people take for granted, because I had never done them before.

But I would be damned if those Negative Creeps were going to stop me from doing the things that I swore to myself that I would do.

And then I learned that there is no fundamental difference between those Negative Creeps and the ones that exist out there. They’re faceless individuals on the Internet who you will in all likelihood never meet, taking their own fears, frustrations, self-doubts, and insecurities out on you. They’re faceless names and addresses attached to random e-mails that spew acid.

The best thing you can do for yourself is ignore them. Don’t try to reason with them because the Negative Creeps don’t use reason. When Horror Screenwriting first came out on Amazon, I was thrilled. Then the reviews started coming in. Then the hate mail. Lots of it.

For all the hate mail there were also lots of “thank you for writing a great book” e-mails that were from all over the world. You want the good you better be prepared to take the bad with it. They’re a matching set. I had focused so much on the Negative Creeps that I had almost completely overlooked that there were others out there willing to take a few moments to write something nice back about how it had helped them not only understand the genre but better understand their approach to screenwriting.

That’s another tool in your arsenal against the Negative Creeps. Take about five minutes and send an e-mail to someone that you’ve been meaning to talk to and try your hardest not to be negative about anything. Trust me when I say that it works both ways. We tend to wield words around like a three-year-old with daddy’s loaded .45 semi-auto. Try not to be like that.

Even the smallest thing you do or say can have an enormous impact on someone else’s life.