Writing: Getting the Emotions Into the Story

 How to Engage Readers with Emotional Writing from Writing Forward I noted a while back but am only now getting around to adding to this blog.

This was why I thought the article important:

One of the greatest skills that a writer can possess is the ability to make readers feel something. If you can engage readers on an emotional level, you’ll have them hooked. This effect is called emotional resonance.

What I want to do with my writing is represent the people I know living their lives as I have seen them lived. Emotions constitute far more of those lives than ideas, much more than logic. I do like ideas - for playwriting I find much I like in Bertolt Brecht, but I disagree that all emotions must be banned from the stage. Emotions, I believe, can make people think.

The article describes how to put emotion into one's writing:

You’ve heard the adage: show, don’t tell. If a character is sad, you don’t write, Kate was sad. You write, Kate lowered her eyes and swallowed hard, choking back a sob and blinking away the tears that welled up in her eyes. When a reader can visualize another person’s anguish, they’re more likely to have an empathetic (emotional) reaction.

And here might be the true purpose of show, don't tell. Telling about emotions blunts those emotions. It is also feels cheap. I feel comfortable with an article telling why there is an emotional reaction, but there must be first a showing of emotions. 

Feelings can be revealed through dialogue. When you use imagery and dialogue together to show (rather than tell) the reader what is happening and to reveal the emotional aspect of the situation, the reader visualizes the action and might experience the characters’ emotions right along with them.

Why do we have all those monologues in Hamlet? To see Hamlet's emotions, which affect his inner thoughts.

Readers are unlikely to have an emotional reaction to material that’s written in an academic or businesslike tone. Writing that is friendly or casual is more likely to put the reader at ease, which means they’ll be less guarded with their emotions. They’ll be nice and primed when you’re ready to hit them with some intense, emotional writing.

Hemingway wrote somewhere about writing one true sentence. He suppressed much emotion to heighten the emotional state of the story, but I like to think that the truth of a sentence must be its emotions. That is how I interpret the following:

 You’ve experienced a range of emotions throughout your life. When you want to convey an emotion and incite that emotion in readers, draw on your personal experiences. Your experience doesn’t need to be identical to whatever you’re writing about, but it should be close and generate a similar emotional response.

That sounds like method acting for writers, it sounds like putting the truth of my reactions into prose telling of a different story. 

sch 10/17/22

From Esquire's The World According to George Saunders

A few of the stories in this collection are rather sentimental stories. I mean that in the best sense of the term, but “sentimental” is a world that's often been stigmatized, especially in art. What do you feel is the place of sentimentality in literature?

I have an old definition of sentimentality, which is that it’s to be avoided because it works on unearned emotion. You don't want to do that because that's cheap. But sentiment, emotion—I'm a big believer that this is the highest level of storytelling. What I'm really saying is you and I, two different people separated by all kinds of things—isn't it amazing that we can both come together at a moment in a story and go, "Yeah, God. Life's like that." That's a stunning thing, and it does happen. It’s a high aspiration to say, "I'm going to assume that the reader thinks and feels and lives very much like I do. No matter who they are, I'm going to bank on that. I'm going to tell a story that assumes that."

That’s where sentimentality gets dangerous, because sometimes you take a shortcut and you put in a sick puppy. You get everybody, but there's something not quite fair about that. If you can spark a mutual earned emotion, I think that's really lovely. One of the gifts of having done this for awhile is that you realize this is really is what people are there for. When you're younger, you just want to be edgy. You don't want to be mistaken for a sentimentalist or a Hallmark person. But as you get older, you think, “Well actually, the great writers—that's what they have done.” Chekhov does this. Dickens does this. It's a feeling of saying, "I felt it, so the reader could feel it, like that."

“Sparrow” started out wanting to be a little dark and edgy and cruel. I remember the exact point where I thought, "Oh no, you're going to take this woman that you made up, who you've already pushed around, and you're going to deliver the death blow. No, I don't want to do that." Then aesthetically, you say, "Well, what else have you got? Do you know of any other possible outcomes?" In trying to find that, you discover a hidden part of yourself that’s actually quite optimistic. Do you have the guts to show it?

I agree with this. 

sch 10/19/22