Method to madness: embrace your rage

Being angry is not the most enjoyable experience in the world and let’s face it, it’s not healthy either… but it can help you write from the gut something so visceral that other people can get goose bumps. Emotions definitely carry energy and when you write with pure emotion, you capture something with letters that can live on forever.

That’s because anger is one of our basic emotions, along with joy, fear, sadness and surprise. It is also one of the most intense when it comes to cathartic experiences in what you write. For me, I will have been contributing anonymously to another blog for 8 years this September and to be honest, without that blog, I would have lost it on more than one occasion.

Throughout I’ve written vents, rants and anything that could serve as a release of all that anger. What’s curious is how much people can relate to anger. What's even more curious is how much I wrote and was inspired by things that make me angry.

Now don’t get me wrong, you can’t be angry all the time because eventually people will get tired of your bitching and you might grow a family of ulcers, but even in anger, I was able to connect to a host of places that to me are quite remote. People from the other side of the world could relate to what I wrote because it came from the heart and it was real.

Nowadays, when I need to write something particularly vicious, I have a few events and people I can think of that will help me get to that point where the screen and keyboard become a blur of whizzing fingers desperate to spew forth and get it all out. Consider it the controlled use of anger. It just takes me a second to remind myself of some events in my life and I’ve been told my entire body language changes and so does my mind set.

At the end of those particularly nasty sessions, I feel relieved... that’s because I captured a couple of my demons on the cleansing seas of paper. So in the end, you could actually give Emperor Palpatine the benefit of the doubt and embrace your dark side... because in the end, it’ll set you AND your writing free.

Cheers