Emotional Truth Revisited
By John Vorhaus | September 24, 2016 |
If you were following WriterUnboxed back in 2013, you may have read a version of the column you’re about to read. (If you can remember having read it, you’re better person than I am; I can barely remember what I had for breakfast.) I was reminded of it recently, and inspired to share it again, while helping a protégé understand that the journey of a writer – a real writer – is the journey toward emotional truth.
Writers often find themselves confronted by the question, “What is emotional truth?” and the further question, “How do I put it on the page?” As someone who has taught and trained writers all over the world – and of course struggled with these questions myself – I find that writers go through predictable stages in their quest to convey authentic emotional meaning in their work.
At first, many writers have no idea that such a thing as emotional truth even exists. They are focused solely on making the logistics hold up, making the jokes funny, or advancing the action from event to event. At this stage, there is little or no thought to a work’s deeper meaning or deeper human understanding. I call this the “run and jump” phase of our writing careers, when all we can really see, and all we can adequately convey, are the mechanical aspects of the work. The mysteries of the human heart yet elude us.
As we mature as writers, we become aware that there’s such a thing as emotional truth, but we don’t quite known how to get this information from brain to page. Our first efforts in that direction often seem awkward and stilted. We might try to write, “I love you,” only to recoil in self-conscious horror at the awful, inauthentic, clichéd obviousness of those words. We hate ourselves for writing so artlessly about subjects of such importance. We haven’t yet made – at least to our satisfaction – the connection between simple human truths and their meaningful, effective, evocative presentation on the page.
But we get better. We do. We grow and develop, deepen our awareness of the truths we wish to convey, and also acquire the means to do so. We discover tools like text and subtext, and bring our writing to the point where one character may ask another, “How about some microwave popcorn?” and have it understood to mean, “I yearn for you to the bottom of my soul.” We become writers with sufficient insight to detect emotional truth and sufficient toolcraft to capture and preserve it in words. So we’re home and dry, right?
Maybe not. Maybe we’re still afraid.
In conveying emotional truth on the page, writers must take a certain leap of faith. Sooner or later we have to recognize that writing about emotional things will necessarily expose us to the very feelings we’re trying to express – feelings we might not be entirely comfortable with. To write successfully at this stage, we have to become okay with just feeling what we’re feeling. We also have to be ready to accept judgment from others – family and friends, fellow writers, the audience at large. We have to be ready to take a stand and say, “This! This is what I believe! This is how I think the human heart works!” That’s a big step. Some writers can’t make it – their story absolutely ends here. For fear of confronting their feelings and for fear of facing rejection, they just never find their way to being honest on the page.
Those who do overcome their fear enter a state of maturity in relation to emotional truth. They know it’s out there, they desire to express it, they have the means to do so, and they are not afraid. This, as far as I’m concerned, is the ultimate goal of a writer’s life: to know the truth; to speak the truth; and to be not afraid.
So then we can think of a writer’s journey to emotional truth as a road toward deeper understanding, better toolcraft, and freedom from fear. It’s useful to stop and ponder from time to time where we are on this road. I myself am currently exactly here: I have a pretty good handle on interpersonal truth – how people are with one another – and now I’m trying to tackle philosophical truth and spiritual truth. I’m trying to convey my deepest beliefs without sounding like a dork or a preacher or both. It’s not easy, and I’m not entirely unafraid, for who wants to look like a preachy dork? But I’m soldiering on, because it’s my understanding that this is what living the writer’s life is really all about: going deep; and, having gone deep, going deeper still.
If you want to see where you are on this road, just ask yourself the question, “What dark secret about myself, my beliefs, my understanding, or my experience would I not want anyone to know?” If you find that you can write about this secret, then you’re already writing within the realm of emotional truth. If you find that you can’t quite yet pull it off, don’t worry, for the path that’s laid out before you is well marked and time tested. If you keep moving toward emotional truth, trust me, you’ll get there.
Or even don’t trust me; just trust yourself. Look back over your shoulder and see the things you used to be scared to write about, but aren’t anymore. There are many. There will be many more. That’s the writer’s life. That’s the journey you’re on.
As an exercise, if you’re game, write a thousand words about that dark secret you don’t want anyone to know. I think that once you put it on the page, it’ll scare you a lot less than you thought – and help you a lot more than you think.
Me, I’ll be right over here trying not to sound like a preachy dork. How is that going so far?
What’s the scariest thing you write about? What do you do to confront that fear?
[coffee]
John Vorhaus has written seven novels, including Lucy in the Sky, The California Roll, The Albuquerque Turkey and The Texas Twist, plus the Killer Poker series and (with Annie Duke) Decide to Play Great Poker. His books on writing include The Comic Toolbox, How to Write Good and Creativity Rules!
You’ve hit on what is one of the biggest challenge many writers face: going deep into your own emotions and then getting that on the page through your characters. The families in my stories tend to be like the ones I grew up around. The parents were stoics who equated strength with not showing emotions. Bearing up and not showing the pain. But by burying the pain, they didn’t deal with it and it festered. That theme shows up in my stories, but I worry that because that was my world view, it seeps into my characters and I’m not going as deep as I should. You have a keen self-awareness on this issue. This is a great post and I am going to try the exercise you recommend. Thanks, John, and we will miss you in Salem, but you will be with us in spirit.
Some things I’ve done so far today to avoid starting to write: checked email, put in a load of laundry, cleaned the cat box, polished all my shoes.
Once I get started I can go for a long time; it’s the starting that’s hard for me. Not because of fear of failure or problems with the story. No, it’s because I’m reluctant to plunge once again into that stew of emotions.
You’re right that “this is what living the writer’s life is really all about: going deep; and, having gone deep, going deeper still.” Even if you’re not unearthing dark secrets, it can be hard to deliberately open yourself to those emotions, at least for me, an essentially even-keeled person. One of my writing students asked me, “You are so calm all the time; how do you write such dramatic scenes?” And while I read a lot, I avoid thrillers or suspense or horror.
I can usually trick myself into starting by freewriting (“We’re just playing here,” as my friend Jill used to say). Off to try that now. Thanks for this post on such an important topic.
This was really good for me to read this morning. I’m in the awkward stage where I’m attempting to write emotional truth. I feel it, but I’m still struggling with transferring it to the page.
Is “be not afraid” an absolute requirement? How about recognizing the fear and letting it come along while writing about it? I can reach my deathbed waiting for the fear to go away. What a sad way to live and write. The struggle is more productive–and hey, it’s more entertaining.
“So then we can think of a writer’s journey to emotional truth as a road toward deeper understanding, better tool craft, and freedom from fear.” Beautifully said, John. My husband has this saying, “go a mile, see a mile”, and your post today made me think if it. You dig down a layer only to find that there’s one underneath, and the deepest ones are the most densely packed. So yes, there’s fear. And yes, we need to feel it. And personally, I will probably always be scared. But I know now that fear comes with the job, which is to tell a good story, yes, but to also tell the emotional truth, because in the end, I think they’re the same thing. The scariest thing I write about is shame and summoning the courage to face it down. There are other things, but that’s the big one. And for the record, I don’t think you have a preachy/dorky bone in your body. Thank you for a great post.
I think being afraid of those emotional truths is really what writing is about for a lot of people. Facing your own fears is difficult. Projecting those fears and emotions onto your characters, and finding ways for your characters to overcome those emotions and fears, is a type of therapy for the writer. Maybe you can’t talk about all this deep down stuff to someone else AS yourself. But talking about these things through a fictional character? That’s much less intimidating.
By virtue of getting old, being disabled, and taking a very long time before my debut novel was published, I have achieved these stages in the same book. Mercifully, most of the first draft has been recycled (I am not saving it for my biographer). Even I could tell that it was severely lacking.
I wonder if some of the fresh-out-of-MFA-program debut writers with the big advances haven’t – and that’s why there is no second book, or the sophomore book isn’t a success, and they sink into obscurity. No depth – except whatever got them to the one book, which they can write in the program. Just an observation, as the lack of followup is noticeable.
The scariest thing is obsession. Grownups are supposed to have control of themselves, get over that phase of their lives, settle down, rear the next generation, and have left a lot of the angst behind.
It doesn’t work that way. The capacity for obsession remains, and can be overwhelming.
‘What you do with an obsession matters,’ is the beginning of the description of Pride’s Children, and what I do with it is to confer several different obsessions on my three main characters, and then let you see how that works from the inside of their skulls – all during the exterior events of the story, which promote those obsessions.
What you do with obsession is called character, the old-fashioned virtue Martin Luther King spoke of.
It is a safe place to put mine. Okay, relatively safe. Circumstances change, but the intensity of the feelings, and their consequences, don’t.
Thank you, such a helpful post.
I had written a long post yesterday, but it disappeared when I hit the Post button. Basically what I said was how important this post is and added that the fear of delving into your WIP’s emotional truth may have nothing to do with dark secrets you don’t want to acknowledge. For me, being essentially an even-keeled person, it’s a reluctance to plunge once again into that stew of strong emotion.
You’re absolutely correct about the necessity of doing so, John, if we want our writing to be powerful. It’s just hard to get started sometimes, hard to give up this peaceful, calm moment, even though I know I’ll be glad I did. Freewriting helps (“We’re just playing here,” as my artist friend Jill used to say). Thanks for the encouragement (literally) in this column.
Great post and thanks for sharing it. Going deep is often difficult no matter the story or your experience. Sometimes, we’ve held on to our feelings or even secrets so long; it is difficult and scary to let go. But, a reader can tell the difference. Authenticity is a must.