This week I read a biographical book about Walt Whitman in the Civil War. I read how the conflict inspired him. So, naturally, I looked around me: what conflict can I tap into to be inspired?

Last year I read A Farewell to Arms, a book inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s experience in WWI. The conflict moved him to write one of the most profound anti-war novels of all time. Whitman had his war, and Hemingway his – what do I have?

I look back at some of the things I’ve written and most of it's about me. My struggles, my relationships and my experiences. I don’t see that when I look into the lives of the great authors and thinkers. They exist to be a voice that comes into a dialogue with the voice of the times. They speak on behalf of a society at conflict. Wallace Stevens speaks to this when he writes in his poem “Of Modern Poetry,” “It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. / It has to face the men of the time and to meet / The women of the time. It has to think about war / And it has to find what will suffice.”

If I were to write a book, what conflict would be seen in my pages? If I were to speak to a crowd of thousands, where would the conflict in my words lie? Maybe it’s obesity – not just physical obesity but a deeper societal obsession with consumption. Maybe it’s the conflict of disillusionment that Chuck Palahniuk talks about in Fight Club when he writes, “We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

Or maybe I should move to Syria. Either way, what I do know is that I want to witness the conflict in our world.