It’s crucial for a writer to feel whatever issue or
emotion you’re writing about. The best way to do this is to identify with a character and be moved by
their sorrows and be concerned about their situation. Also, be excited with them,
afraid with them, happy with them. Get
inside their head to have them become real. Otherwise they will become a wooden
mouthpiece that readers cannot respond to.
Sometimes it means to feel emotions that you may not
be comfortable with. Take panic for
example. If I had to write about panic, I would close my eyes and feel that I were
in a dark, claustrophobic space, holding my breath while I hear footsteps
approaching. If I were writing on
hunger, I would write on an empty stomach to find the right descriptions to
invoke a level of desperation that a character experiences.
That sounds easy enough, right. But here’ a more complex
tidbit. As you write a story— it has to
develop in some kind of unexpected way. It is important to let your
short story unfold organically so that this can happen. Often we
plan the scenes, the dialogue, the rising action, the climax, very meticulously.
I encourage and believe we have to do that to a certain extent if not, we are
going to get lost. As architects and builders we need to have a vision and plan
in mind. But we also need to allow the work to manifest its power, to allow
characters to do unexpected things, to approach the fictional world we are
creating with a sense of child-like wonder, and to be ready to see what might happen.
As things come up out of our subconscious when we write—we have to let them
breathe and trust when it happens. Sometimes
this means not knowing the end until we get there, and being fine with that.
Sometimes those unexpected
moments when shapes loom out of the dark as we're driving through unknown
territory turn out to be the richest in our writing. When this process works,
it creates a powerful moment of discovery in the reader, echoing the discovery
we felt as we were writing.
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