7 Ways to Access Vulnerability
By Kathryn Craft | November 9, 2023 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
I’d told the story too many times, that was the problem.
At first it spilled incessantly. It was as if the horror reflected on my listeners’ faces was the only way I could get it through my head that my experience had been real: my husband of fifteen years, dead, by suicide. But over time, like a river taking its same, inevitable course, my story grew predictable, tumbling over obstacles so familiar their edges had smoothed. I learned where to pull back so as not to make my listener quite so uncomfortable. Where to breathe so I could make it through to the end without sobbing.
I suspected this was why, once I novelized these events, my trusted first reader told me I’d skimmed over the emotional depth of the story’s ending. Her critique of the dark moment, in particular, told me I’d defaulted to this verbal telling mode instead of using the full power of literature to evoke my character’s experience.
“This is what the reader has been waiting for,” she said. How many times had I said the same to my own editing clients? “The very reason you wrote this story. Give us more emotion. Go deeper.”
With these words, I suddenly felt unequal to telling my story.
Of course that’s nothing new either. About three-quarters in, I’d hit this point with every single creative endeavor of my life, whether in choreography or academic writing or fiction, so I was able to recognize this despair for the critical role it plays without abandoning the project. In the story of writing this novel, I had hit my own dark moment. To prevail, I had to learn what I was made of.
I sat with the uneasiness this caused.
And almost let myself off the hook. I mean, I was writing fiction. Who would blame me if I refused to bathe in the blistering tar of memory to explore how my character felt? I thought of the reader willing to plunk down their money for my novel, and yet in the end, would not be served.
The subject was thorny, to say the least. In real life, as I was about to learn how the day-long standoff ended, the emotions I felt were conflicted and shameful and very personally mine. And oddly fractured—when I heard the news that day, the words pierced me through even as I was also somehow watching myself react, in that dissociative way that can be the result of shock. Those emotions had the potential to hold a world of story.
If, on the page, I dared to give them life.
As a reader, I laud the author who is willing to rummage deep in the basement of their psyche, identify the deeply personal emotions stored there, and then lend them to their story. Here’s how I tapped the vulnerability that allowed my conflicted characters to show their messy human emotions.
- Seek source material that can reestablish a severed connection
I leaf through sympathy cards and letters—those drawn by the classmates of my 8- and 10-year-old sons just about unglue me. I call others who were close to me at that time to describe their own feelings, and ask what they’d observed in me. I peruse notations in my planner from that year and, for the first time, reread the journals I’d kept as our marriage fell apart. Maybe my husband thought I read them often—inside one of them I find a note I’d never ever seen before, a list he’d made of the ways he could become a better husband. He’d clearly wanted me to find it, even though he wouldn’t live long enough to act upon it. I open the envelope speckled with his blood and reread the suicide note he’d written in his half-print, half-script writing. Scrawled dramatically across the bottom, a parroting of our vow: “Till death do us part.”
- Let music open a vein
My first thought upon rereading that note: we still have not parted. A lyric keeps rolling through my mind, so I open Spotify and play “Poison & Wine” by the Civil Wars. Over and over, its haunting refrain builds: “I don’t love you and I always will.”
I’m not typically the kind of writer who can listen to music while I write, but I hit replay over and over as I read again the news coverage that broadcast my husband’s private torment throughout the community. Headlines that made neighbors think they knew him when clearly, even his wife didn’t.
- Allow setting to enhance meaning
I explore the setting for what it can offer the scene I must rewrite. The firehouse social hall where police kept my family safe that day had played host to so many family functions, from baptisms to weddings to funerals. On the day of the standoff it was devoid of decoration, as if waiting to see what kind of event this would be.
What characters can I use? I have the corporal in charge of the Special Emergency Response Troop operation, who offered no expectation about the day’s outcome, yet who felt invested due to her own backstory—her father had hanged himself. She found him. I have a police officer and an EMT, both in uniform. They await their orders because this time, I’m in control.
- Make use of subconscious clues
My advance reader had noted an unconscious repetition of the color red. Red: passion, blood, love, horror, birth, death. Awareness is power. As I check back through my novel’s emotional turning points, I make more purposeful use of this motif, and jot a note to self: keep in mind for emotional climax.
- Seek revelatory metaphor
Metaphor has a way of inviting the reader to co-create this important moment. I recall Irene Nemirovsky’s paired images of residents fleeing Paris during World War II in Suite Francaise:
People were jammed together like fish caught in a net, and one good tug on that net would have picked them all up and thrown them down on to some terrifying riverbank.
…
This was how animals waited to die. It was the way fish caught in a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth above them.
I can make better use of my secondary characters to suggest how my protagonist feels. The corporal has been on the scene seven hours now when she receives news, but her face is as unreadable as a soldier’s.
My character is desperate to know, she needs to know, but suddenly she wants time to stop.
But the corporal is marching inexorably toward my protagonist, flanked by the uniformed EMT and police officer. An image materializes: an honor guard without a flag.
- Seek literary role models
Beyond metaphor, I want the very arrangement of my words to deliver my protagonist (and therefore the reader) to the emotional place I seek. What affecting literary passages have led me toward this kind of breathless moment?
The military image makes me think of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. I thumb back through my worn copy to study the stream-of-consciousness prose the protagonist uses while confusing his memories of a girl he loved with the overwhelm of his grievous injuries:
Stay closer Kareen. Don’t go away. Closer closer Kareen and watch out for the water coming over your face. I can’t turn over on my stomach to swim Kareen I can only float so please don’t go so far away. Kareen where are you I can’t find you and the water was coming over your face. Don’t sink Kareen don’t let the water come over your face. Come back Kareen you’ll choke you’ll fill up like I’m filling up.
I see now. Just as I’d always stifled emotion in the verbal delivery of this tale by controlling my breathing, I could let it rip on the page by omitting punctuation and not allowing the reader a breath at all.
- Review and tweak emotional turning points
I am almost ready to rewrite this scene. But before I dredge the depths, I want to make sure the story has properly set up the dive. After all, the story had failed to lead me here in the first draft—will I now be forcing this emotional scene into place?
Reviewing the infrastructure of the novel, I see that something important is missing from my protagonist’s arc. My protagonist’s turning points were all about how she was dealing with events imposed upon her by a husband whose needs were direr. I was missing her dreams. Her innocence. Their love.
The source materials I had to review this time felt more dangerous than the headlines or my husband’s handwriting or his desperate words: the candid, unguarded moments captured in our wedding album. For the first time since the standoff, I allowed myself to remember what it was like to fall in love with the man I married. Back when our dreams were all wrapped up in each other.
Suddenly, this story’s main threat emerges from the fog. The standoff threatens to take away the very thing each of us needs to sustain hope: the ability to dream of a brighter future. To set that up I had to rewrite the beginning.
My heart quivers, unsure how to find its natural rhythm while exposed to the fresh air. The artifice of fiction will not be enough to protect it from public scrutiny. All will be able to see its bloody imperfection.
Vulnerabilities now hanging like severed threads from the gaping hole in my chest, I kick aside my practiced storytelling about the event and pick up re-inflamed emotions, old notes, new inspirations, my character’s all-important goal—and allow my reader access to every sensation as the truth marches toward her. This time the words don’t flow, they churn. Edges worn smooth by verbal storytelling are once again sharp enough to cut.
My character now in this godawful place, I-as-author feel like I won’t be able to breathe until my heart is once again tucked away inside me. I think I’ll never be able to repeat such a process.
I’m wrong. Vulnerability does not cause retreat, at least not for me.
It’s a rush that tells me I am fully alive—and I can’t wait to write again from this deep place. Tools may have pointed the way and started the lava flowing, but everything I truly needed was stowed in the depths of my psyche. If I survived their retrieval once, I can do it again.
Just try to stop me.
Have you ever struggled to reach the full depth of a character’s emotional state? Were you called out for not doing so? Were your efforts satisfying, in the end? Has “going there” ever gotten easier? I’d love to hear your experience.
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
[coffee]
Wowww.
🧡
“…I laud the author who is willing to rummage deep in the basement of their psyche, identify the deeply personal emotions stored there, and then lend them to their story.” This is so beautifully said, and a powerful goal to strive for. Thank you, Kathryn.
You go, Susan!
Thank you for opening many veins to share this acutely personal and vulnerable story.
You’re welcome, Carol. I hope it inspires you!
Love the ways you’re demonstrating how to be vulnerable in our writing. This post really reinforces what you’ve been telling me, Kathryn, about digging deep instead of telling the reader what just happened in an impactful scene.
Oh good! Glad my emphasis was on “show” today!
Kathryn, you are so brave! I admire you. I’m not there… in fact, I am ashamed to admit I can’t even write some things just for myself. And if I dare to…I can’t bear it and tear out those pages and rip them into tiny pieces. Yup, for all the bravado, a dreadful darpoke, big chicken. Thank you for showing me a way. Coincidentally, I’m reading Deena Metzgar’s Writing for your Life and just this morning attempted one of her writing prompts. Progress.
Awareness is step one. But each time you expose more of your conflicted emotional core—and not only don’t you die, but people thank you for your efforts—you get a little braver. It’s an amazing journey. I’m glad to hear you’re on the path!
Kathryn, your emphasis on show (emotions) was a reminder for me. Reading your story made me realize that I “told” the feelings of my protagonist when her best friend died (of cancer). That hospital death scene was written months ago, and your story made me think of added show that would bring her experience from darkness to light. The protagonist’s first inner thoughts at her best friend’s bedside were anger that she cut off and replaced with a deep sadness; She would never hear her voice as backup singer in the rock n’ roll band. Running through her mind like a needle stuck on a record, was her best friend’s soft humming, “Amazing Grace,” with her last breaths. You gave me some great ideas to work with from you revealing your emotions of a deep and sad personal experience. Thank you. 📚🎶 Christine
The scene has such emotional potential, Christine. It’s not admirable to feel that a friend is dying at an inconvenient time, but it’s human, especially if the healthy friend’s involvement in the band has been the all-consuming focus of her efforts. She couldn’t pull it off in time and she has to move her anger aside so she can access her fuller sense of loss. Great stuff.
Thank you Kathryn. Another dimension of the emotion sounds great. The protagonist’s relationship with the dying friend was also as her boss, a hospital ER Nursing Director. The protagonist was her assistant. They were a dynamic team! 📚🎶 Christine
Kathryn, time. Pain. Time. I remember reading your novel when I was living in California. It seems so long ago…but it is not, in many ways it is always now. So glad we were together in Chicago, your laughter, your smile as we got lost down some dark street. You have never been lost. You are a pathfinder, Beth
What a lovely comment, my sweet friend.
“In many ways, it is always now.”
So true.
Kathryn – your columns here never disappoint, but this one, oh my! I’m searching for the right words to express how your search for the right words have opened up a new way of thinking for me. And right when I’ve been struggling for weeks with the scene where my protagonist nearly dies. Thank you.
I love the magic of your words here too, Suzy: “opened up a new way of thinking.” So happy to have made a contribution to that! We creatives need ALL the ways of thinking, right?
What a great post, Kathryn. It’s a recipe, ingredients and instructions, for dealing with those moments in my work that disappoint. The other one that occurs to me is, “Have I set it up well enough?”
Thank you.
Yes, that one was a big help to me as well’ thanks for reading, Bob.
Kathryn:
As a writer whose stories involve more emotional and psychological development than physical action, I felt like your post was aimed right at me. I struggle with striking that balance between writing trite, overlabored emotional reactions and trite, superficial ones. I can apply your advice to just about every one of my WIPs. Thanks1
Yes you can, Christine! Just remember to build the story that will deliver the reader to the right emotional place and you won’t need to spend so much word count on describing that emotion.
My hat is off to you, Kathryn. I can’t quite approach my suicide day though I’ve written parts of it in other work. But letting it fully rip in a story? Just not there. I don’t even want to write “yet” to finish previous sentence. You are full of courage to dredge yours up. I do remember my delay to put on makeup before going to the scene, before knowing fully what happened, yet suspecting, and thinking to myself “What are you doing?!”
“ I do remember my delay to put on makeup before going to the scene, before knowing fully what happened, yet suspecting, and thinking to myself “What are you doing?!”
This in itself is so powerful, Leslie. It encompasses all the fear and uncertainty and desire for preparedness that this woman—you—are feeling.
Wow indeed. I can’t imagine being so brave to share my worst day.
Marcy—practice in a journal, on pages only you will ever see. Once you appreciate your own conflicted humanity, you can transfer its power to your characters.
Wow. I am sorry that you went through that form of loss, and I’m impressed at your ability to not only explore that in your own writing, but translate the process you used to offer advice on how others can also truly explore and expose their own vulnerability in fiction.
I suspect I will be revisiting this post a few times when I reach the revision stage of my current WIP. I get to keep a step removed, in some ways (though not as far as I think a lot of people may believe), as someone who writes fantasy. But I am definitely sending one of my main characters into a fantasy world iteration of one of my own most devastating experiences. Tearing that still tender scar open again is going to be… interesting.
“Tearing that still-tender scar open again is going to be…interesting.” That’s a great start, Dorian!
Affecting and insightful, Kathryn. You let us into your personal iteration of what Hemingway says writers must do–open a vein and bleed. 🧡
Thanks Tiffany. Super great hanging out with you this week at UnCon!
The very reason you wrote this story. Sitting with it. Thank you!
Yes—sometimes, others recognize the demands of our stories quicker than we do. Then, it’s on us to rise to the challenge. Thanks for reading, Chris.
That was so powerful, and so useful. It’s something I also struggle with – how to convey the darkest depths for a character, and you have reminded me so well that it lies within me. It’s my job to dive down and find it.