Writer, Know Thyself
One of the hardest parts of writing for most authors is to be honest with the reader. It’s perfectly understandable… fiction, by definition, is fabrication. It’s a lie. So, while the author is busy raising and lowering the strings of all the puppets in his or her story, the trick is to insert enough truth so as to make the audience relate to what’s happening. Trickier still is to insert that truth so seamlessly so as make its inclusion unapparent and yet still be emotionally affective. The longer the story, the more important that emotional truth be an element of one or more characters. However, unless you are writing some sort of psychiatric manifesto, it’s key to mine this precious ore judiciously.
Emotional truth is that element you insert into your story directly from your own life. It’s not important that the event be something that happened; what you are trying to convey is how it felt. By giving an honest description of a feeling due to a certain stimulus, your character(s) can reach depths of connection with real people that pure imagination rarely equals.
As powerful as it is, that power is diminished if it is employed too often. Wait for a moment in the story, or in a character’s development, when it’s important for there to be a reveal into the soul of a character. By borrowing from your own life, you can help transform their fiction into a sort of reality for others.
This is that hardest part of writing for two reasons: 1) It’s hard to be honest — we all have our walls that we put up to keep ourselves safe from hurt, whether real or perceived; 2) Many, if not most, writers tend to be reclusive introverts — as a result, there is a lack of some life experience, as well as the extremes of emotions, that others who are more socially ept acquire through the natural course of living. From my own life, I try very hard not to feel extremes of emotions — I find the roller-coaster draining and generally distasteful. Even so, I’m a human being, and I do (and have) experience a full palette of emotions. I know fear. I know joy. I know love. I know loss. I know pain. I know comfort. I know uncertainty. I know acceptance. And so many other emotions due to events in my life. You, like every other person who writes, have a tool box that is just as diverse as anyone’s and is uniquely your own.
My personal taste for using this powerful element in one’s arsenal is to reserve it for revealing character in the otherwise unremarkable moments. When a character is having some sort of epiphany, the event itself is so large that the emotional truth gets lost in its glare. Wouldn’t it be better to withhold our affective treasure for some moment when it can have a stage to itself?
Let’s try an example. I’m not going to spend a lot of time developing this, for I’ve yet to use it in a story — I’m not quite ready to use this particular truth — but it might help to illustrate what I’m talking about.
Here’s the context for the emotion: many years ago, I wrote to a dear friend of mine of many years — we’d always danced around the prospect of having a relationship — and told her how much she meant to me and that I loved her. I called her about a week after I sent the missive to follow-up. Yes, she had received and read the letter — on the day she got back from her honeymoon. Ouch. Needless to say, the ol’ heart had known better days. A whole spectrum of emotions colored my world.
OK, so here’s the problem from a writer’s perspective: s/he can be “on the nose” with this and apply the emotion within a scene echoing this specific context; or, instead, wait until a moment where something less raw triggers the emotion. In the first method, its possible that the readers are now bringing in their own emotional baggage or prejudices to the narrative which is already going to be confused with the other details that are coloring the scene… the actions, the setting, etc.
With the latter option, the author can bring in the emotion just before the poor schnook is preparing to approach someone else with romantic intent, or maybe after seeing another couple connecting, or maybe when seeing someone who looks a lot like his unrequited love — the exact situation being dependent on the story. So now we can bring in the emotion as a flashback (which can work in this situation, but is a little trite), or maybe as a small (big?) anxiety attack, or maybe an amalgam of the two… the emotion with a couple of memories, or something else entirely. Thing is, now in a cleaner context we can focus on the emotion without having anything else steal attention.
The point here is that you are feeling instead of showing. This is a rarely talked about element of the writing paradigm. Show-instead-of-tell is still, and should be, the mantra of most writing. You need to paint a picture with words. But pictures alone are just images. That’s when you have to toss in the unexpected Feel-instead-of-show. It’s so win-win-win. Your characters win because you respect them enough to give them part of yourself. Your readers win because they get depth that many writers aren’t willing to insert. And the writer wins, because some of those emotions that would otherwise be cementing the blocks to our own emotional walls instead get to go out and play and be useful — besides, sometimes it’s a little cathartic.
