I’m tired and sleepy, but I need to get a vomit done. I don’t feel like I can freeball it completely, so I’m going to resort to my todo list again– this time I’ve got something that says “write about the role of emotion in writing”. Okay, here I think I can play.
Emotion in writing. On one hand, I think it’s practically the most important thing– although maybe that is limited to a few contexts. So let’s think about it in a few different contexts. [1]
On the other hand, I also think it’s necessary to practice writing in a dispassionate way. To avoid making sloppy arguments based on emotions. To avoid logical fallacies.
I’m increasingly thinking that it’s important to write in chunks– to just really explode in a particular state and just keep going and going. There’s something about the totality of a single session of writing that’s almost impossible to recreate if I stop halfway. (I can only speak for myself.) Ray Bradbury wrote something about how important it is to write fast– when you write fast, you don’t have time to stop to think about each particular word. You don’t even really think too much about the feel, you don’t pay attention to your sentences. You just go. You just go and you keep going, and when you’re done you look back and you realize that you weren’t entirely in control. There were all sorts of things bubbling up from your subconscious and they come through you however they want to, whether you like it or not. This has been explored most famously/popularly by Elizabeth Gilbert in her TEDtalks (which I know I’ve referenced a couple of times in my earlier vomits), as well as by all sorts of thinking and writing about creative work. You can schedule your daily starting points, and have a routine of getting started, but once you start you’re off to the races.
I don’t have very much to say about the editing process yet because I haven’t yet sat down to properly edit my word vomits yet. But I do edit writing for work, and in that space I am familiar with what needs to be done. You need to cut away as much as you possibly can. You need to merge as much as you possibly can. Sometimes you need to rewrite things altogether. Sometimes all the rambling you do is just to help you find out what the story actually is, what the crucial or critical thing actually is. And then you start from scratch with that. This is something I sense myself slowly grasping, slowly waddling towards. I think I want to grow up to become a writer like Asimov or Orson Scott Card or Ray Bradbury or really any other kind of fiction writer. I just need to get started ASAP, write lots of little short stories and be ruthless about it. I might start writing short stories halfway into this vomit project, why not? I don’t want to just keep writing about my own mind, about my own stream of consciousness. That’s boring and that’s limiting. I’ve written a couple of pieces of dialogue in a sort of experimental way. But I should do more of that. I’m hesitating because I haven’t quite thought clearly about what I want to write. I’ma create a task for that.
I guess I’ll use my last 250 words or so to talk about when this process has waylaid me a little. It typically happens when I’m really angry, or when I’m really excited. I’ve written things that I regretted on hindsight. I don’t regret the emotions themselves– I regret how I allowed myself to be vague, to be handwave-y. I regret how I’d generalize, how I would insist that something was the Worst Thing Ever. In reality, things are rarely that dramatic. And what’s amazing, I’m starting to realize, is that if something really DOES turn out to be the Worst Thing Ever, sometimes a great way to show it is with measured restraint.
Might be oversketching here. The point I’m really trying to make is that as writers we should never allow force of emotion to prevent us from doing the research. And the scary thing is that when we’re invested in a position that we feel strongly about, we can even be disdainful of the very idea of doing research. Or if we do do research, we do it in a cherry-picked way to make sure that we only read what we already want to read, what already confirms our opinions.
If something moves us, if we feel strongly about something, that’s a sign that it’s important to us in some way. But that’s also a sign that we owe it to ourselves and the subject matter to examine it closely, ‘dispassionately’– consider all the possible interpretations. Consider the possibility that we might be wrong, that we might be mistaken, that we might have to change our minds. Develop an appreciation for the broader context. There can still be beauty in the story then, and in fact I think all that context only adds to the beauty. It never subtracts. You don’t necessarily have to use all of it.
Oversketching. This will happen over and over again. Quite excited to move forward and repeat myself with this until I have it down in a clear and succinct fashion. Note to self: Revisit the past two posts about emotion and explanations.
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[1] Emotion is obviously one of the most critical things when you’re writing fiction. You want your audience to feel something. You want them to root for some characters or some situation, you want them to follow along with some conflict, some journey, you want them to feel something at the outcome (not necessarily pleasure or joy or resolution, it could be something unsettling or negative– whatever! The point is that you must move them or you wasted their time.) But I think it’s important even in dryer things like business writing, or even academic writing (and here I’m just talking out of my ass about what I believe, but I’m just going to say it anyway.) I think even when you’re writing something dry, there’s always some reason why you’re doing it. There must be something. If it’s business writing, you’re probably trying to help somebody achieve some business outcome. And they would have feelings about that. Even if you’re just helping somebody meet his sales target, or you’re helping her get better at using excel, there is some reason why that matters to them. That’s where the emotion comes in. We are not robots. We are not machines.