Running hot & cold
Or tackling the ups & downs of your story's ups & downs
Capturing emotion on the page, interviewing techniques, a(nother) gap in my reading, why you should apply for grants: this issue is full o’ stuff!
Craft: Playing with emotions
When my sister was in primary school, her teacher told the students to write a funny story. Before long, Tina handed in her work: a story about going to the zoo. The teacher read it, and then called Tina up to her desk to explain that while she had written about a day when she had had fun, but she hadn’t written a funny story—one that would make a reader laugh. Tina went back to her desk, and a few minutes later returned, handing back the same story—with the words “ha ha” squeezed in at the end of every line. She did make the teacher laugh—though it wasn’t exactly the assignment the teacher had had in mind.
Getting emotions onto—and off of—the page is one of writing’s toughest challenges, and I think it’s because we’re actually conflating two different things. One is the challenge of capturing the emotions in a particular scene—and this can be especially tough when we are grappling with powerful emotions, doubly so when it’s a scene from our own lives. The other is the challenge of making the reader feel what we want them to feel.
It’s tempting to tell readers how we want them to feel, by using words like angry, joyful, enraged, scared, thrilled—to label the feelings of the people on the page like stage directions for how the reader should then feel. But how angry do you feel when you read the word angry? How joyful when you read the word joyful? Not very, I’d guess.
This is the spot where you’ll expect me to say “show, don’t tell.” And yes, that’s part of the answer. But not all of it. Because what are you supposed to show? And how do you show it?
I’ll turn to a poet for some insight here. First, some joy, from Mary Oliver’s “Her Grave” from the collection Dog Songs (yes, I’m going to use a poem about a dog’s grave as an example of joyfulness, because that’s the kind of person I am):
She would come back, dripping with thick water, from the
green bog.
She would fall at my feet, she would draw the black skin
from her gums, in a hideous and wonderful smile—
and I would rub my hands over her pricked ears and her
cunning elbows,
and I would hug the barrel of her body, amazed at the
unassuming perfect arch of her neck.
Oliver takes us inside a moment of joy, of love, the intimacy between human and animal companion, as one revels in the beauty and physicality of the other. Notice how something almost ugly—that hideous and wonderful smile, the gums contrasted against the skin—is used in a scene about love, and how the hard “c” sounds in pricked and cunning signal sharpness, the round “b” in barrel and body contrasting in the next line, the “ar” in “arch” giving aural shape to the arch of her neck. The picture is painted in sounds, a moment of ardor anyone with a dog in their lives would recognize.
Or this, from Susan Orlean’s classic piece, “The American Man, Age Ten,” first published in 1992 and later anthologized in The Bullfighter Checks her Makeup:
“If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers and long, baggy, T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would never be too hard and we would always have just finished it. We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home. We would win the lottery and then buy land in Wyoming, where we would have one of every kind of cute animal. All the while, Colin would be working in law enforcement—probably the FBI. Our favorite movie star, Morgan Freeman, would visit us occasionally. We would listen to the same Eurythmics song (“Here Comes the Rain Again”) over and over again and watch two hours of television every Friday night. We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals. We would hang out a lot with Colin’s dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.”
Orlean uses a series of specific details that capture the dreams, passions, desires and particular way of understanding the world of a 10-year-old boy in a particular time and place. She doesn’t tell us to smile or to laugh—but we do, especially when we land on the silliness of the slingshot of dog food and the specific, perfect use of the word “butt.” (Substitute bum, ass, arse, behind, posterior, back end—none of them work as perfectly as butt.)
Musician and author Patti Smith brings us inside the mind of another child, herself, in her book Woolgathering. Here, she uses a single scene to capture the longing creative spirit alive in this younger her:
“All my socks were out of shape. Possibly because I often filled them with marbles. I’d load them with aggies and steelies and head out. It was the one thing that I was good at and I could beat anyone around.
At night I’d pour my booty upon my bed and wipe them with a chamois. I’d arrange them by color, by order of merit, and they’d rearrange themselves—small glowing planets, each with its own history, its own will of gold.
I never had a sense that the ability to win came from me. I always felt it was in the object itself. Some piece of magic that was animated through my touch. In this manner I found magic in everything, as if all things, all of nature bore the imprint of a jinn.
You had to be careful, you had to be wise. For the discerning might catch something far away and draw it close.
And the wind caught the edges of the cloth that covered my window. There I kept a vigil, alert to the small, easily becoming, through an open eye, monstrous and beautiful.
I would gaze, gauge and just like that, be gone—vane avion, flitting from earth to earth, unconscious of my awkward arms or wayward socks.
I was off and not a soul was aware. For it appeared to all that I was still among them, upon my little bed, rapt in child’s play.”
But what about when dealing with more difficult or traumatic incidents? Do you describe the specifics of the trauma—who did what to who, the mechanics of physical acts? In sexual assaults, for instance, the mechanical description can be a secondary form of violence—and a source of titillation for some readers. What about when we see gory scenes in movies and television shows? I’ve stopped watching some series because the gore had no emotional pay-off—it just made me feel agitated, spiking on the adrenaline of the scare. But—and yes, there’s always a but—not being specific carries its own risks, of protecting readers from the impact of an act so that they don’t have to acknowledge it fully, or suggesting through omission that what happened is shameful, shame we often lay at a victim’s door rather than a perpetrator’s. (I’m going to use an example related to sexual assault in the next four paragraphs, and later one referencing a child’s critical illness. If you wish to skip this material, scroll down to the paragraph that starts “In all of these examples…”)
In Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay grapples with this problem, opting initially to tell rather than show—and to lead into that telling with a layered explanation of how and why she has distanced herself from speaking plainly about what happened. Early in the book (pp 38-41 of my edition) she circles the question, saying “I don’t know how to talk about rape and sexual violence when it comes to my own story. It is easier to say ‘Something terrible happened.’” She then proceeds over the next three pages to use the phrase “something terrible happened” as a kind of building refrain as she steps forward, moves back, circles around and over and under. And then finally, plainly, she writes:
“It is easier to use detached language like ‘assault’ or ‘violation’ or ‘incident’ than it is to come out and say that when I was twelve years old, I was gang-raped by a boy I thought I loved and a group of his friends.
When I was twelve years old, I was raped.”
Over the following pages, Gay moves from that statement—telling—to showing, taking us inside the scene in the woods. It is a horrible story, but the language she uses is spare, simple, detailed but not florid or overwrought—and because it is simple and descriptive, it is all the more powerful. She doesn’t tell her reader how to feel. She shows her reader what happened, and leaves room for them to feel what they feel in response.
And there are some things she doesn’t share. She writes: “They did things I’ve never been able to talk about, and will never be able to talk about. I don’t know how. I don’t want to find those words. I have a history of violence, but the public record of it will always be incomplete.”
The writer Aleksandar Hemon traverses similarly emotionally difficult territory in his essay “The Aquarium,” about the illness of his youngest child and the imaginary friend his older daughter conjured during this period in his young family’s life. Like Gay’s scenes in the woods, Hemon uses spare, direct language in taking us inside the scenes in the hospital. He is also a master of pacing, alternating these scenes with sections of reflection, stepping out to deliver medical background or to grapple with bigger questions, and you’ll notice that in these reflective and contextual sections, the language is more complex, aimed at our heads rather than our hearts. This moving in and out of scenes, stepping forward and backward, builds tension but also gives us moments to catch our breath, to steel ourselves for what might come next.
In all of these examples, scenes filled with specific details do the work of conveying emotion. But I’ll circle back to the top: while all of these examples provide guidance in getting emotion onto the page, what guidance do they give us in how to control what our readers feel?
And I’d answer: not much. Because I don’t think we have as much control over what our readers feel as we might like to have. We can’t tell readers what to feel. We can only show them what made us feel—and maybe they will have the same reaction, but maybe they won’t. Where we react with compassion, their background and experience may lead them react with disgust—or vice versa. I think—maybe—that when we wield our tools well, we can be mostly sure that readers will feel something, and even mostly sure that those who are most like us will mostly feel like us…but there’s always a risk that they will feel not at all, or differently.
Tips
Question your own emotions: Sometimes the struggle to create an emotionally impactful scene is rooted in our own discomfort with the emotions that scene prompts in us. What are you averting your gaze from? Dig into the sections you’re tempted to skip or gloss over. What are you avoiding? Is there something there that needs a closer look?
Pace yourself: Look for opportunities to slow the action down, to break emotionally loaded scenes into pieces. Move in close to the scene, then pull back and layer in context and background. Build suspense, but then give your reader time to breathe, absorb.
Map the emotions: Take a scene or section, and in its margins, jot down what emotions you hope each segment provokes: joy, curiosity, compassion, shock, outrage, intellect/rationality, frustration, etc. Now, look at your word choices, your sentence and paragraph lengths—how are they supporting or thwarting those emotions?
Exercises
Beauty and the beast: Contrast can be your friend. Look for moments of beauty in ugly scenes, of ugliness (Mary Oliver’s dog’s hideous grin) in moments of joy, of humour in them all. The contrast within a scene can brighten joy and add depth to despair. Take an emotional scene you are struggling with, and step back inside it. What details can you draw out that add contrast?
Hot and cold: Choose a scene of high emotion and write it as hotly as you can: unload the full arsenal of over-the-top language, superlatives and all. Florid is your first, last and middle name. Go for it! Then walk away, have lunch, come back. Now go at it cold. Write the scene as dispassionately as you can. Use simple, direct language. You are an unfeeling camera lens: describe what you see. Put both versions aside for a few days. Review. Revise. Rewrite, using the best of both. Hot writing isn’t necessarily bad: there may be images, wordplay, rhythms in that heat that will add impact.
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What I’m reading: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
“I was surprised you didn’t include Anne Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird,” wrote my friend Dinah Forbes after my last e-newsletter, filled with writing craft recommendations, hit her in-box. Confession: I’ve never read it, though I’ve read other pieces by Lamott along the way. So, at Dinah’s urging, I’ve cracked it open. Always happy to be pointed in the direction of a good book I’ve missed!
Other good stuff
Read Three pieces related to emotional writing that are worth your time, the first two short essays on craft, the last an example of an emotion-packed piece: “Going Cold: Writing Emotion, the Earley Scale, and the Brilliance of Edwidge Danticat” by Dylan Landis; “The Vein of Jade: Restraint in Nonfiction” by Michael Downs; and “My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me” by Wil Hylton.
Watch Sean Cole is a producer with This American Life who has been a guest at the New York Winter Residency of the King’s MFA program. Check out this interview with Sean about interviewing. It’s focused on interviewing for radio documentaries, but much of it also applies to print interviews.
Listen Want to hear Sean Cole at work? Here he is guest-hosting This American Life, including a couple of his own segments.
Book industry stuff
Apply early, apply often: Canada Council juror and author Sherwin Tjia offers their advice on applying for Canada Council funding on the Quebec Writers’ Federation blog. (And their advice applies to all kinds of granting programs.) Bottomline: Do it! (Also, this post led me to the QWF blog, which is chock-a-block with great articles and good advice—worth browsing.)
Getting your self-published book into libraries: It’s easier than ever to self-publish, and do it well—but still tough to get your self-published book reviewed or into library systems. Check out this piece from Jane Friedman’s blog, by guest blogger Ilham Alam, on getting your self-published book onto library shelves.
Tweets and stuff
This feels…familiar
This feels…inspirational
And these are just plain lovely.
Obligatory picture of Buddy
Buddy says “Remember summer?”
Stuff at the bottom
I’m a writer, editor and teacher. This is my personal e-newsletter on the craft of writing nonfiction, sprinkled with occasional feminism and social justice. You can find out more about me on my website at kimpittaway.com. You can also find me on Facebook and Twitter. I’m the executive director of the MFA in Creative Nonfiction limited residency program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. If you’re interested in writing a nonfiction book, you should check our program out!