Allowing your emotional side to show through your writing isn’t always easy. If fact, for some people it is frightening. We can see, we can feel, but sometimes fear of “being found out” can hold us back.
Despite my claim that “writing what you know is a myth“, I have never been able to fully exempt myself from my characters and story lines.
Image: www.tearstojoyministries.org
While we can attempt to build characters out of whole cloth, my guess is just about every one you pen will be modeled on someone you know, or will be an agglomeration, a mixture of several people you either know, or who are characters from books you’ve read, Movies, or TV shows you’ve seen. Does that sound bad to you? It isn’t.
As writers we have several important tasks to perform. We need to craft a story and to build a setting. More importantly, we need to people our tales with human beings that the reader can believe in. Suspension of disbelief can only take us so far. Hobbits, Elves, Vulcans, Klingons and the like need enough humanity in them for the rest of us—the readers, the viewers—to be able to identify with. One of the best ways of doing that is by borrowing iconic human stereotypes.
Borrowing, however, really only gives us the outer shell. For a look inside a person, we need to look inside ourselves. Need to? I don’t think we can help it. When it comes to feelings, to the day-to-day emotions that we all feel, I think we have to model on the fears, the hopes, the loves, the loss, all of what we feel within ourselves.
If you let the fear that someone will find out your weaknesses, will guess your foibles, will intuit your deepest darkest secrets… here’s the bad news. Even if you fully invent every emotional scene in your story, your readers—especially those close to you—will assume that they know you through your characters.
Get used to it. If you don’t think that writing is a “performance art”, you haven’t been paying attention.
Your thoughts?
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio... and isn't it time you experienced some of them?
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It’s easier to deal with the emotions of characters you like and can be quite exhausting when you have to get into the heart of a dark character and face your own darkest feelings.
Excellent post, Rik.
And Cindy’s comment . . . spot on!
What I hate is when someone says “no one feels like that,” or “that isn’t the way it feels.”
I guess it means I haven’t described it well enough, but it sure makes me feel inadequate, especially when the emotion is one where I know very well what it feels like.
Now that I have clobbered the word ‘feel’ I will stop. I guess I need the Thesaurus, don’t I?
Once again we come across the “demon” or “angel” or hermeneutic perspective! It can be either one depending on, well, your hermeneutic perspective. No matter how we intend to convey feelings or emotions, or how we describe any given circumstance, there will be as many different understandings as there are readers. The most magical thing about writing is just that: it can mean different things to different people. It is impossible NOT to mean different things. So, Deeper Colors, there will always be those who haven’t the foggiest what you are trying to say or express, but rest assured, there will probably be as many others who do understand from their own perspective. Let yourself off that “hook” and keep writing what you know to be true. You never know when you will strike a vein or ring a bell! (Or when you won’t!
) Of course what would be REALLY ironic about this comment is if I read your comment from a perspective which you did not intend!
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