Writing Fiction with Emotional Honesty

when was the last time a book changed you what stories have made you think cry fall in love feel uncomfortable left you in a state of awe or despair I always come back to Sylvia plus the bell jar the novel is about a young woman interning at a magazine in New York City as she faces the intense social pressures around her she sinks into a deep depression part of what makes the story harrowing is that it's semi autobiographical with the events and feelings based on real parts of Sylvia plas life the protagonist tries to commit suicide and it's obvious PLAs struggled to the same emotions she too had attempted suicide and later killed herself at the young age of 30 I've read passages from PLAs tire ease and the emotions in those pages echoed the bell jar in so many ways here's a quote from the unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath what is my life for and what am I going to do with it I don't know and I'm afraid I can never read all the books I want I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want I can never train myself and all the skills I want and why do I want I want to live and feel all the shades tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life and I am horribly limited Plath mirrors that frustration of being unable to live multiple lives and her fiction particularly in this passage from the bell jar I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story from the tip of every branch like a fat purple fig a wonderful future beckoned and winked one fig was a husband and a happy home and children and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor and another fig was eg the amazing editor and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree starving to death just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose I wanted each and every one of them but choosing one meant losing all the rest and as I sat there unable to decide the figs began to wrinkle and go black and one by one they plopped to the ground at my feet this type of semi-autobiographical work is sometimes called a Roman a clay a French term meaning novel with a key where a novel about real life is presented through a fictional facade there's an obvious appeal to this approach as it allows the writer to create distance between the actual events they experienced in the feelings tied to them through the safe distance of a fictional lens they can then inspect those emotions closely and perhaps more objectively since they're pretending to see the experience through someone else's eyes pouring our deepest feelings into stories allows us to connect with other people across time and space and in writing with emotional honesty we better understand ourselves so how do we tap into those deepest internal wells and show those emotions on the page it's easier to summon this intensity in memoirs because we're intimately familiar with our own thoughts and feelings when writing fiction imagining someone else's mindset can be more difficult because those thoughts and feelings must be in but it can help to borrow from personal experience find what scares you seek contradictions and hard questions and create beauty from life's uncertainties let's examine these four tools in our writing toolbox like Sylvia Plath you can borrow from personal experience as writers our lives inevitably bleed into our fiction sometimes subconsciously but more often as a form of direct inspiration we might hide our former loves and the pages or inject emotions we felt in real life into a funeral scene Virginia Woolf once wrote every secret of a writer's soul every experience of his life every quality of his mind is written large and his works in his short story collection The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien draws heavily on his experiences as a Vietnam War veteran the narrator and protagonist of these stories share is his name with the author because Tim O'Brien set out to write a book with the feel of utter and absolute reality a work of fiction that would read like nonfiction so O'Brien blends fiction with reality and his piece good form he mentions that story truth is sometimes truer than happening truth implying that the emotional truth of the narratives would create can be truer than the facts here is the happening truth I was once a soldier there were many bodies real bodies with real faces but I was young then and I was afraid to look and now 20 years later I'm left with faceless responsibilities and faceless grief here is the story truth he was a slim dead almost dainty young man of about 20 he lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of meek a his jaw was in his throat his one eye was shut the other eye was a star-shaped coal I killed him what stories can do I guess is make things present I can look at things I never looked at I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God I can be brave I can make myself feel again daddy tell the truth Kathleen can say did you ever kill anybody and I can say honestly of course not or I can say honestly yes O'Brien chose this narrative approach to show his own emotional truth sharing I can say that the books form is intimately connected to how I as a human being tend to view the world unfolding itself around me it's sometimes difficult to separate external reality from the internal processing of that reality in a way writing with emotional honesty is writing what you know like Tim O'Brien you can pool events or emotions from your life and paint them and new colors so even as you channel your emotions into the characters you have the freedom to reshape scenes from your own life into a larger narrative make up the details to better capture a particular feeling with storytelling you also have the power to explore the past not taken in your life and the feelings that evokes right naked Jennifer props book on her experiences as a romance novelist talks about writing from your real self my heroine flees her wedding through a church window because her gut screams for her to run I didn't listen but she did I was able to play out those what-ifs in my fictional world but doing so left me vulnerable I opened up old wounds examined them and explored the book reeks of emotion because I poured myself into the story the scene she's describing is the opening chapter of her novel searching for beautiful and there really is an immediate connection to the protagonist because of her intense conflicting emotions the novel opens with a woman named Genevieve a getting cold feet five minutes before her wedding run the inner voice that had been squashed for so long in fear of retaliation rose up from her gut and screamed one last word Jen clutched at the windowsill ridiculous she couldn't run right people only did that in the movies besides she couldn't do that today Ronn the past two years with David taught her to sit through her riding emotions and connect with the core of rationality that hid in every person Center her fiance despised messiness impulse and decisions based on emotion he cited death and destruction time and again until she'd finally managed to quiet that crazy voice that had once sung in freedom slightly off-key but always joyous Jen figured she'd beaten it back so hard in fear and determination that she'd never hear from it again but of course with her lousy luck it had taken this moment of all moments to reassert its independence and general brattiness run the first too late her brains spun in a mad rush not much time left once her family came in it was over they've calmed her down termit bridal jitters and escort her down the aisle she'd marry David and she'd never be the same again which would be good right she wanted marriage forever commitment with David Jen looked behind at the closed door the action she took in the next few seconds would set her on a course that would change the rest of her life right from the novel's beginning the reader is drawn in with an intimate look and two Jen's conflicting emotions which make her feel like a real person in her book on writing jennifer props gives advice on how to write naked without taking off your pants even if you are composing a love letter the best way to connect is to spill your deepest darkest embarrassing secrets reveal the stuff that terrifies you and keeps you awake at night talk about the monsters in the closet the ones hiding under the bed get in touch with the kind of emotions that drive the fear of abandonment failure and pain the best way to connect with your real self is to get naked strip your soul bare and throw it out there that brings us to how you can find what scares you author and editor John Matthew Fox expresses a similar sentiment and writing about what you fear what terrifies you I'm not talking about Psychopaths and mask movies for the ravenous undead or spooky moments coming home late to find your front door open I'm talking about true terror I'm talking about the fear of a child dying the fear of estrangement from a parent the fear of working a career for 40 years only to discover you've wasted your entire life on meaningless paperwork because I find that writers are often avoiding their true subjects they write about things adjacent to what they should be writing about because they are too frightened to write about what terrifies them he advises writers to find the greatest trauma regret or terror and structure a story around it and that story will have heart and heat post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction like the road by Cormac McCarthy and 1984 by George Orwell are often fueled by the very human fear of society falling apart or surrendering our freedoms to a controlling government but Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale draws on the particular fear of women losing their agency and becoming no more than baby makers in a religious totalitarian state that would felt motivated to write this story because of the political trends of the 1980s in which the book was written and during an interview she said this is a book about what happens when certain casually held attitudes about women are taken to their logical conclusions for example I explore a number of conservative opinions still held by many such as a woman's place is in the home and also certain feminist pronouncements women prefer the company of other women for example take these beliefs to their logical ends and see what happens as a writer you can choose to create a mainstream novel in which these issues appear only as the characters discuss them sitting around the kitchen table the I decided to take these positions and dramatize them carry them to their furthest logical conclusions with her later novel Oryx and Crake she emphasized as with The Handmaid's Tale I didn't put in anything that we haven't already done we're not already doing we're seriously trying to do coupled with trends that are already in progress so all of those things are real and therefore the amount of pure invention is close to nil Atwood based her fiction on reality and her fears for both the present and the future we can see that attitude reflected in the pages of The Handmaid's Tale is offered addresses the audience is that how we live then but we lived as usual everyone does most at the time whatever is going on is as usual even this is as usual now we lived as usual by ignoring ignoring isn't the same as ignorance you have to work at it nothing changes instantaneously in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it there were stories in the newspapers of course corpses and ditches are in the woods bludgeoned to death or mutilated interfered with as they used to say but they were about other women and the men who did such things were other men none of them were the men we knew the newspaper stories were like dreams to us bad dreams dreamt by others how awful we would say and they were but they were awful without being believable they were too melodramatic they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives we were the people who were not in the papers we lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print it gave us more freedom we lived in the gaps between the stories at their heart many books are about fear along with its bedfellows of anger despair and apathy michael crichton's techno thrillers explore the consequences of science going too far Angie Thomas's young adult novels focus on racial tensions and police brutality Shirley Jackson's horror stories revealed the quiet evil that pervades ordinary life as an article by Paulo grande put it Jackson herself wrote I have always loved to use fear to take it and comprehend it make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there I delight know what I fear and finding your fears ask yourself those personal questions what hurts to think about what have been the most emotional events in your life are you ready to write about them doing so might lead you to seek contradictions and hard questions Charlie the main character in The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky says so this is my life and I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be cognitive dissonance is the state of holding conflicting feelings or beliefs at the same time a loved one dies and you don't grieve as much as you feel you should or you don't believe in horoscopes and yet you would never date a Gemini that complexity is important when it comes to conveying the characters emotions as Donald masse describes in his book the emotional craft of fiction what gets readers going are feelings that are fresh and unexpected if those feelings also need to be real and true otherwise they'll come across as contrived they'll ring false and fail to ignite the readers emotions skillful authors play against expected feelings they go down several emotional layers in order to bring up emotions that will pet readers by surprise there's always a different emotion to use sometimes we hide our feelings because they don't match up with what we're supposed to feel and we're afraid to express them for fear of judgment rejection or scorn fiction helps us wrestle with these uncomfortable truths as Donald masse notes the most useful question is not how can I get across what characters are going through the better question is how can i get readers to go on emotional journeys of their own take for instance Patrick neces a monster calls the idea for the story came to author Siobhan Dowd while she had cancer after her death Patrick Ness wrote the story of 13 year old Connor who has nightmares of a monster calling to him this is a spoiler so skip ahead 2 minutes if you want to read the book without knowing the ending the central conflict hinges on the concept of cognitive dissonance feelings that many readers can relate to Connors mom is dying of cancer and although he loves her part of him just wants it to be over for her to die so there's no more suffering the climactic moment Connor tries to wrestle with his own self-hatred as the monster delivers his final lesson the answer is that it does not matter what you think the monster said because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day you wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her the mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary and your mind will punish you for believing both but how do you fight it Connor asked his voice rough how do you fight all the different stuff inside by speaking the truth the monster said as you spoke it just now Connor thought again of his mother's hands but the grip as he let go stop this Connor O'Malley the monster said gently this is why I came walking to tell you this so that you may heal you must listen kind of swallowed again I'm listening you do not write your life with words the monster said you write it with actions what you think is not important it is only important what you do facing contradictions is about asking questions that don't yield easy answers it's easy enough for us to read a story about a bad man being punished but what about a person struggling to define right and wrong in an interview with WH Smith Patrick Ness said one of the qualities he enjoyed exploring in the character of Connor was his realization that he can think two contradictory things at the same time which was a step from childhood to adulthood above all Ness one of the story to be true to have a story with blood in the veins bad tempers and good tempers he goes on to say I think humans are amazing messes and I love us for our mess and Connor is just realizing okay I'm a bit of a mess but it doesn't make me bad it doesn't make me wrong it just makes me human and if I'm honest with what I'm feeling I'll be okay we all contain contradictions and that's what we can explore in our stories pull it Robert Browning once wrote our interest on the dangerous edge of things the honest thief the tender murderer the superstitious atheist ultimately writing is a form of thinking we don't have all the answers the best we can do is show the world as we see it and come closer to understanding ourselves we can create beauty from life's uncertainties an article and the Atlantic by wilhunt entitled getting loss makes the brain go haywire explains that when we are lost say in a cave our brain is at its most open and absorbent the paraphrases poet John Keats and saying to make great art one must embrace disorientation and turn away from certainty being lost Asador and to understanding your place in the world for author Frederick Buckman he felt lost and how to cope with his loved ones growing older and losing their memories he grapples with that idea and his novella and every morning the way home gets longer and longer she takes place in an older man's mine represented by a town square that shrinks every day he's visited by his wife his son and his grandson although he doesn't always remember who they are and one of his more lucid moments he tells his grandson once your goodbye is perfect you have to leave me and not look back live your life it's an awful thing to miss someone who's still here you can feel how deeply personal this story is to Bachmann not only from the emotions conveyed in the text but also from what he writes in the author's note this is a story about memories and about letting go it's a love letter and a slow farewell between a man and his grandson and between a dad and his boy I never meant for you to read it to be quite honest I wrote it just because I was trying to sort out my own thoughts and I'm the kind of person who needs to see what I'm thinking on paper to make sense of it but it turned into a small tale of how I'm dealing was slowly losing the greatest minds I know about missing someone who was still here and how I wanted to explain it to all my children I'm letting it go now for what it's worth it's about fear and love and how they seem to go hand in hand most the time most of all it's about time while we still having but writing with emotional honesty doesn't mean focusing on only the sad and scary stuff it's about mining those deeper truths and existential questions and larger-than-life feelings sometimes it's impossible to label an emotion or explain why you feel that way it just is I love the questions that editor Mary Cole poses and her book writing irresistible kid lit what makes you come alive what does it mean to be who you really are what truth does the world need to hear what truth do you need to give your heart to what truth will liberate you as a human being who are you really and who have you been waiting to become Zahra Neale Hurston captures that Normandy of our inner lives and the beautiful passages of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God one scene shows the main character Janie as a teenager looking toward her future but when the pollen again gilded the Sun and sifted down on the world she began to stand around the gate and expect things what things she didn't know exactly herb left was gusty and short she knew things that nobody had ever told her for instance the words of the trees and the wind she often spoke to falling seeds and said I hope you fall on soft ground because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed she knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether she knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sunup it was wonderful to see it take form with the Sun and emerged from the gray dust of its making familiar people and things have failed her so she hung over the gates and looked up the road towards way off she knew now that marriage did not make love Janie's first dream was dead so she became a woman there's almost a stream of consciousness feeling to this passage as Janie's lofty observations flow from one to the next in a way that mimics a real thought process she waits for something she can't describe she feels this communion with nature and God she hopes for a different better future as she grows from childhood to adulthood you don't need to have everything in life figured out impactful books explore those uncertainties within their pages these tools can help you write powerfully but how do you know for sure that you're writing naked one actress writer and singer Susan Blackwell most famous for the one act met a musical title of show teaches that the most important thing in writing is define the hot making if while you're writing your face starts to feel hot it means you're getting at something deeper hot making is a sign of resistance to digging that deep in yourself and what you must do is push onward through it the words of Robert Frost no tears and the writer no tears and the reader no surprise and the writer no surprise and the reader as a writing exercise let's do some soul-searching write about a time you felt ashamed and raged conflicted or lost choose one of those conflict rich emotions and described what happened how you felt why you felt that way and what you did as a result write this journal entry to an alien who has never experienced human emotion and try to convey the intensity of the feeling in a way that makes someone share in your emotions now think about if they shanell scenario or character that you can imbue with that emotion keep in mind that you don't need to share your writing with anyone for it to have value and if writing about a particular experience is more painful than therapeutic then maybe it's best to step away from that subject if a story ends up being very personal for you have your first reader be someone you trust who will be generous in their appraisal find your support system and others who share the same struggles or worldview as you do the pieces of ourselves we hide in our fiction give the story's life and readers seek out those intense emotions perhaps that's why many popular novels are autobiographical there's power and vulnerability as Jennifer prop says but great risk mean great rewards when people are asked about the regrets in life they often list the things they didn't do the book they were afraid to write because it wouldn't sell or because the writing was too difficult or because they were too busy doing things that were safe or marketable writing naked is the only way to write our writing tells readers that we loved cried feared and experienced pain we were important this is what we saw and this is how we showed the world our personal view of what it is to be human and alive I believe that good writing is the confluence of things you can write things you want to write and things that scare you to write find your strengths write a story you're passionate about and fill it with questions that keep you awake at night whenever I feel far from myself I turn to Sylvia Plath I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart I am I am I am what was the last book that made you feel intense emotions write me a comment about why it had that effect on you whatever you do keep writing [Music]

Channel: Diane Callahan - Quotidian Writer

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Keywords: how to write, writing, fiction, literature, books, authortube, booktube, Diane Callahan, Quotidian Writer, creative writing, writing inspiration, creativity, the bell jar, sylvia plath, a monster calls, patrick ness, the things they carried, tim o'brien, jennifer probst, literary, romance writing, zora neale hurston, their eyes were watching god, the handmaid's tale, margaret atwood, shirley jackson, writing advice, writing tips, get published, novel, book, storytelling, roman a clef

Id: psL8BEqEm-M

Length: 28min 46sec (1726 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020