Write With Spite - And Other Ways To Fight Writer's Block

I wrote one of my favorite stories when I was angry.

A year ago, I had reached one of my lowest points in life. You know, as one does when that bridge between adolescence and adulthood appears a little earlier than you anticipated. I won’t go into detail because this is not a blog post to make you pity me, nor is it the best way for me to introduce myself to you. So, here’s a proper introduction:

Hi! My name Emily Drez, and spite is probably my biggest motivator.

Now that we’ve gotten that out the way, I want to say that it took me about 20 years to figure out my own writing groove, despite wanting to be a writer my entire life. Until I was about twenty-and-a-half years old— harboring so much pent-up angst and having a stare-down with a blank Word document for the sake of a deadline—I never knew how to start a story. One of the very first stories I wrote bled from a pen I borrowed from my mom’s hairstylist. While I was waiting for her in the salon, I jotted down an idea in an old notebook. I thought I’d be some child prodigy with a story about wizards and vampires and the Girl Who’s Not Like Other Girls.

I never finished that story.

It extinguished itself at my fingertips when I tried to revive it in college. My heart was no longer in the pages I composed at thirteen years old. Dejected and discouraged, the creative writing major went a couple years without writing anything (it’s me; I’m the creative writing major!). That is, until I found myself sad, angry, and afraid right around the time I had to submit a short story for a fiction workshop class. All those dark emotions dripped from each word I wrote. The story is called “darlings,” and, through the catharsis, I found myself justifying to my professor why I chose to write about an unhinged female protagonist with body parts in her basement.

Okay, Emily, get to the point.

My point is this: I have found that the best way to overcome writer’s block is to pull your stories from the apex of your heart. I mean, really get into those emotions and dump them on your pages. In this series of blog posts, I will be showing you each route I have taken with the stories I have written in the past year—and no, not all of them are spiteful.

Peace,

Emily