Emory Stevens
My name is Emory Elizabeth Stevens, but I go by Emmy. I didn't start writing until I was a little under ten years old and living in Joplin, Missouri. Back then, I wrote about unicorns and heroes with glittery powers. Now, not much has changed except the stories have gotten longer.
My favorite flavor of writing is fantasy. Why is this? I honestly don't know. I think it has something to do with a natural fascination with the unknown and the frustration that, in reality, the unknown can be a bit boring. Take a creaking sound in the middle of the night: is it a dream-stealing goblin sneaking through the house? The opening of a magic door that leads to a world of dragons and mud monsters? Has Santa come early this year because I've just been that good? Nope. Turns out the pipes in your bathroom need to be replaced.
This is actually why I'm working on the narrative for a game concept called Sibilus Orbis. In this game, stars don't twinkle because they are balls of gas thousands of miles away, they twinkle because a giant bird person in the sky is using them to whistle souls into existence.
But not all my works are directly related to nature's known mysteries. Sometimes, I just get jealous that other people have made these amazing game narratives or written expansive stories with unique twists. So I try to one-up horror movies by writing my own spooky story…like my work Bitter Root End, where a veggie-headed creature gets very invested in the deathly aroma dripping off a man living on the outskirts of town.
But I've recently learned some of the best ideas come from asking what if? This is the same process I used to create Flowering, a game where you are an insectoid and assistant to the community's head apothocary during a nasty epidemic. It all started by me thinking, What if I drew a person with an irregular shaped head? From that, I thought it looked like a bug, so I drew a bug person. But what are they doing? It looks like they're flying down, but down what? What if they were descending into a cavern? What if that cavern was filled with glowing moss and mushrooms? What if that bug person was collecting the mushrooms to make medicine? But why would they need medicine? What if… and thus, a story was born.
But thinking of an idea is one thing. How do I write? How did I start writing? How has my style evolved with me? Because I've been writing for so long, it's hard to pinpoint how my style developed. It's kind of like someone covered me with glue and shoved me down a steep hill. Whatever sticks, sticks, as I tumble my way down the path of writing experience.
What I do know is that I've always had an interest in the whimsical and the monstrous. There was no particular moment when it all clicked. It's always been clicking together, shaping itself into a glorious lego death star of writing expertise.
I've also dipped my toe into the art form of poetry. Like when I wrote The One For Me, a short poem about finding love (even if it's not necessarily with another person). I like how this poem can be interpreted as finding joy in your life on your own, not needing a partner to be complete, a ballad to aromantics, or anything else people can see in it. That's the beauty of poetry: no matter how specific people try to make it, it can be interpreted in a multitude of ways.
At the end of the day, I want people to read my work or play my games and walk away thinking wow, that was cool, I might just do that again. I know that I will never stop writing and never stop learning from my experiences. I just have to leap forward and hope I don't lose my biscuit when I risk it.