Emotions Turned into Fuel

"I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions.  I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."  – Oscar Wilde

What is the best motivator for a story?  Is it that the main character has a goal he must accomplish?  Is it that the author gets his message across?  Is it to kill time while sitting in a waiting room?  Personally, I write because of emotion.  Emotion is my great motivator.  I want to feel something from a story.  It is difficult to make me cry, but if I smile while reading, that’s a win.  It is more than simply engaging me, it is making me feel.  Very few books have really tugged at my heartstrings.

Why emotion?

Why not emotion?  Are you not fueled by how you feel?  Do you sing from happiness or joy?  Do you push yourself forward by sadness or anger?  Emotion is a constant yet it fluctuates like a living being breathing in the world around us and exhaling how your environment, family, friends, situation, life affected you.  In my case, emotion had dug its claws deep and refused to let go.  It would become too much and I would shut down.  There were times when I tried hard not to feel.  I started writing because I needed an escape.  My emotions were transformed into words and poured onto the page.  Every time I needed a way to sort through my emotions, I wrote.  If you read my old work, you could tell how I was feeling when I wrote a scene.  By doing this one little exercise, I overcame my internal struggles.  If you have read a previous post of mine, you would know that I struggled with myself.  While I never saw a psychologist, was never diagnosed, I believe that I suffered from depression for a few years.  It wasn’t until after I discovered writing that my self-diagnosed depression began to disappear.  It was a surprising change.  I never asked for it and was not expecting anything.  I felt good.  Even today I return to writing when my emotions begin to pile up.  If there is nowhere to turn to, it is my happy place.  

Why not turn stress into motivation?

Stress did not grant me an outlet.  Throughout college, I dealt with more personal problems and with that stacked onto my school work, at times I felt like I was suffocating.  I tried to play soccer, as I had done in high school, though I felt sorry for our goalie when we warmed up and he tried to block my shots (let’s just say that my kick grew stronger and, without trying, my aim was, um, accurate).  After a while, my usual stress relievers didn’t do the trick.  Our recreational team was co-ed (both boys and girls) and we were always short on girls which meant that I would play a whole game without a break.  It was tiring.  It eventually became that I preferred to write my papers over go out. 

However, I did pick up reading again.  For some reason, when I was little, I enjoyed reading, then I just stopped. And hated to read.  Because of that, I have no idea how I graduated high school (especially considering all the reading material for my dual-credit English classes).  Funny enough, I was organizing those books on my bookshelf last night and when I held Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens in my hand, I laughed at how thick the book was.  No, I never completed the book, didn’t make it halfway, instead, I cheated and watched the movie (which was surprisingly close considering book to movie adaptations are not always accurate).  Anyhow, reading became a begrudged pastime for me.  I tried my first year of college, but after finishing a book and a half, I gave up.  Reading was annoying and the stress of failing my classes, amongst others, sucked the life out of me.  Books were just shelf filler for the next few years.  Then, third-year, living in my apartment, I found the book I had half-finished and thought to myself “Might as well,” so I finished it.  After that, oddly, I wanted to complete the series, which I did.  Then I went to a Borders closing and grabbed a few more books.  I kept reading.  My dad picked up on this and got me a Barnes & Noble Nook Color for my birthday that year.  I still have it and it still works.  It became my favorite possession.  I went everywhere with that thing.  I would read while waiting for class to start.  I would use it as a bible while at a church thing.  I loved that thing.  Reading was no longer annoying, but relaxing.  I still remember during Spring and Fall, I would grab a book, a drink, and a towel and go to the parking garage roof to read when the weather was nice.  Then I would remember the paper I was supposed to be writing and read for another hour.

During that time, my friend had asked me to help her with a club she had started on campus.  I agreed on one condition, that I would be allowed to work on my homework.  She agreed, which was a relief because I did nothing but writing papers and sleep.  Then the Character Creation Contest came around and that was where I stumbled into this world of writing.  Because of the bonus points for a background story, I started writing and would not stop.  I created my own world.  I had my characters experience trials and tribulations that I created.  I used them to tackle the monsters that were gnawing at the edges of my subconscious.  It helped me breathe.   

How did you decide that emotion was your motivation?

Recently, my curiosity got to me and I opened that first story.  Generally, it is a mess.  It bounces all over the place, but considering I had no idea what I was doing, it was alright.  I read over a few chapters and shook my head.  My grammar was amazing.  I wrote from a third-person point-of-view, which I somehow now dislike, and it worked.  I cringe at the story overall, but there are a few scenes that I am proud of.  The emotion that I felt as I read made me smile.  It was a hard time in my life, my characters suffered because of it, but the words were calming.  I felt my anger, my confusion, my tension from when I originally burned a hole on my keyboard.  Other stories had followed, each channeling a different emotion.  Most are incomplete.  Most will never be finished.  One, I have no idea what I was thinking when I started writing (it kind of leads nowhere).  The point, however, remains the same: that I write to escape the stranglehold that my emotions trapped me within.  Writing, focusing my energy on something productive, cleared my head.  I was able to think and address my problems through a different point-of-view other than my own.  I could ask my characters what they would do in certain situations and how their different personalities changed the outcome.  The more passive the character, the more accepting they were.  The more aggressive, the more confrontational.  One of my characters, Kali, started as an incredibly passive, accepting girl.  Over time, she developed, realized what was going on around her and why she was in that situation in the first place.  When presented with the opportunity to gain what was viciously ripped away, she was hesitant, but soon saw the good in the change.  Kali started following her own path instead of being dragged along by others.  She was the character that I channeled myself through the most and wished that I could idolize.  I wanted to grow myself.  I wanted to do my own thing and not be told what I had to do.  I knew that I had to view my world differently.  It took effort, but I managed to force myself to see the positive.  All the underlying emotions, they needed an escape and I gave it to them through my pen.

Did it help?

I accepted the challenge of changing.  From my first quarter at college, I had been struggling, fighting to rebuild my GPA.  Due to circumstances out of my control, my grades plummeted.  I didn’t think it was possible to have a GPA below a 1.  That’s right, it happened.  So, every day since the end of that first quarter, I struggled, fought to regain my academic stability.  By the beginning of my fourth year, I had managed to get it up.  I also changed majors twice, but I landed in a place where I was happy.  My major involved a lot of papers, which I did not mind.  I researched.  I wrote.  I actually enjoyed it.  Weird, I know, but who are you to tell me otherwise?  I was doing my thing!  I was doing well in school.  My social life had suffered, but I didn’t care.  I had a few good friends and I was happy.  I don’t need a crowd of people around me.  A friend to sit beside and study and eat seven-layer dip and joke with was all I needed.  Still, I dealt with my emotional demons, but I was content.  I wrote or read during my free time, whatever little I had.  I had become a happier person.  So, I kept writing.  Challenges still bombarded me after college and I kept my head low to avoid confrontation, but it was unavoidable.  My sanity slipped and what little joy I had grasped slid through my fingers which lead to me diving into my writing when I could.  The little space that I created revived me.  In those moments where I could sit and create, I found what I wanted, quiet.  It was a place where I could break the rules, be who I wanted to be, and bend the laws of nature.  I eventually got out of a negative situation and moved, but my love of writing never left.  Happy, sad, angry, or depressed, my pen has always given me a way to sort through the confusion.