The best writing reflects a deep commitment as well as the willingness to become vulnerable. How much is your writing costing you?
Writing Tip for Today: What are some ways to write honest emotions?
Refine Your Purpose
Writing is meant for your readers. Even autobiographical material isn’t really about you. It’s about how your experiences or learning makes your reader say, “Hey, I can relate to that.” If you are guarding some part of yourself, your writing will show it.
How? As you shield readers from stuff that is too something, you lose the ability to convey universal conditions and human emotions. When you stay on the surface of any story—fiction or nonfiction—it becomes much harder to evoke reader emotions and elicit that “I can relate” goal. Fictional characters must stir reader emotions to be memorable. Memoir must show readers that you agree to be brutally honest.
As you write, ask yourself what universal emotions/conditions you want readers to walk away with. This is often called the “takeaway.” Takeaway doesn’t mean you tell readers what and how to feel. Rather, your takeaway is the satisfying reward for reading about experiences that readers can understand.
Open a Vein
Some of us are more private than others. Yet all writers want their readers to identify with the emotions a story can give. The old adage, “Writing is easy—just open a vein and let it bleed out,” has a kernel of truth. Writing well is not easy, but does require the writer to be honest and transparent about the main emotional takeaway.
Try a different approach. Ask yourself what universal condition you are attempting to convey and which experiences (scenes) illustrate that condition best. Build your scenes in a way that shows the character growing and changing over the arc of the story. Show your character getting knocked down, but getting up again.
Then ask yourself if drafted scenes could be more vulnerable, more emotional, more universally relatable. To end up with honest and authentic writing, it’s usually necessary to reassess where you’ve protected the character or the narrator. Remember, these characters are all filtered through your own biases, attitudes and emotions. To write with empathy and honesty, revisions are often necessary.
To write with empathy and honesty, revisions are often necessary.
Digging Deeper
When you go for writing gold, ask yourself how much it will cost you. Authentic writing may bare unflattering or uncomfortable aspects of yourself and your characters. Take a look at each piece of a scene to see where you might “crack it open” as I used to tell my students.
Cracking it open is almost always about uncovering motivation. What happened before this scene to make the character react in a certain way? Many times, you won’t chronicle all the back story, but you will draw forward the emotions that it produced. If your character vows never to fall in love again, readers will need to know at least part of why the character has been wounded.
As you begin to get closer to that universal condition or emotion, be sure that your takeaway isn’t too preachy or neat. After all, human emotion is complex and no two people are alike. Still, when you open that vein and let it bleed, aim for things we all need: love, acceptance, belonging, etc. Avoid filling your prose with resentment and bitterness. Instead aim to capture your readers with heart-felt longing, redemption or hope.
