Ramping Up the Scary--Or Any Emotion
I love this bit of wisdom from writer Richard Bausch, known for his wonderful short stories. If you don’t know his work or his words, check out this article on Lit Hub about how impossible it is to ruin writing. Or this interview in Fiction Writers Review.
His thoughtful ideas on image and emotion will be the basis for our writing exercise this week.
"Make your feeling in things, images. There is so much more in an image because that is how we experience the world, and a good story is about experience, not concepts and certainly not abstractions. The abstractions are always finally empty and dull no matter how dear they may be to our hearts and no matter how profound we think they must be."
This is echoed in one of my favorite writing books, From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler. Butler recommends doing away with any interpretation (thoughts and feelings about things, essentially). Let the things stand for themselves.
Readers are smart!
Readers are smart. They get the meaning behind the message, if the message is delivered through images.
A book's "inner story," or the message of meaning in their writing, is primarily delivered to the reader through these images that reveal emotion, rather than through abstract thoughts and feelings.
Often counter-intuitive to the new book writer, so check out your favorite stories and see how the emotion is presented at a peak moment. It comes through a gesture, an object, the way light glints on a table top that's just been shined. Images are how readers absorb the emotional impact, or payoff, of such a moment in a book. I find this true, no matter which genre we're working in.
For this week's writing exercise, I encourage you to test this out. Maybe the fun of it will distract you from eating all that Halloween candy!
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Choose a passage from your writing that is abstract: maybe it's internal monologue, or thoughts and feelings from a character or narrator or author.
Locate a tangible "thing," as Bausch says, that could possible convey this emotion or thought.
Play with taking out the abstract and letting the thing speak for itself.
See if the emotional impact is enhanced.
What did you notice?
Photo by Beth Teutschmann on Unsplash