Ramping Up the Scary--Or Any Emotion
What’s new in my writing room: if you haven’t read my latest novel, Last Bets, check it out—two women artists try to escape their lives by fleeing to a Caribbean island, but paradise isn’t what they find. A little scary, but mostly heartfelt, according to reviewers. About female friendships and morality, and how we rescue each other’s hearts in unexpected ways. Last Bets was selected for Kirkus Reviews' Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year!
Photo by Beth Teutschmann on UnsplashI love this bit of wisdom from writer Richard Bausch, known for his wonderful short stories. If you don’t know his work or his words, check out this article on Lit Hub about how impossible it is to ruin writing. Or this interview in Fiction Writers Review.
His thoughtful ideas on image and emotion will be the basis for our writing exercise this week.
"Make your feeling in things, images. There is so much more in an image because that is how we experience the world, and a good story is about experience, not concepts and certainly not abstractions. The abstractions are always finally empty and dull no matter how dear they may be to our hearts and no matter how profound we think they must be."
This is echoed in one of my favorite writing books, From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler. Butler recommends doing away with any interpretation (thoughts and feelings about things, essentially). Let the things stand for themselves.
Readers are smart. They get the meaning behind the message, if the message is delivered through images.
A book's "inner story," or the message of meaning in their writing, is primarily delivered to the reader through these images that reveal emotion, rather than through abstract thoughts and feelings.
Often counter-intuitive to the new book writer, so check out your favorite stories and see how the emotion is presented at a peak moment. It comes through a gesture, an object, the way light glints on a table top that's just been shined. Images are how readers absorb the emotional impact, or payoff, of such a moment in a book. I find this true, no matter which genre we're working in.
For this week's writing exercise, I encourage you to test this out. Maybe the fun of it will distract you from eating all that Halloween candy!
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Choose a passage from your writing that is abstract: maybe it's internal monologue, or thoughts and feelings from a character or narrator or author.
Locate a tangible "thing," as Bausch says, that could possible convey this emotion or thought.
Play with taking out the abstract and letting the thing speak for itself.
See if the emotional impact is enhanced.
What did you notice?
Shout Out!I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know if you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)
Mary Walerak, Finding Alineade (Kirk House Publishers), August
Karen Lueck, The Green Thread: Reclaiming Our Spiritual Authority (Goodness Press), September
James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November
I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.
I’m also the author of 15 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. it was also a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2024. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.
