Allure and Enchantment
When I started writing many years back, one of my first creative writing teachers told me that I had a method of writing that reminded him of Mark Twain. At the time I wasn’t a very well read person, and so I knew practically nothing about Mark Twain or what he wrote or how he did it. Regardless I asked my teacher what they had meant.
It was because in this particular case I had written a piece with a focus around Joan of Arc, it wasn’t long and it mentioned the very little I had read about her but it still brought her up. And my teacher said the way I spoke about her was as though she were this brilliant spark in my life, as though I loved her and I wanted to share that love with everyone else. He had only seen this once before, with Mark Twain, who wrote the recollections of Joan in a couple of volumes, about her entire trials and life.
That day, he also told me that if I managed to write everything with that kind of passion and love behind it, then there was no way I couldn’t be a great writer some day.
Who would have guessed that years later I’d have a (self) published book and actually become a writer? I sure didn’t, I mean I was taking the class as a creative outlet means because I was by no means a very good writer, in fact it was hardly a year or so back I had been doing Hooked on Phonics because I was such a terrible reader. But there I was, being told I had one aspect of writing down: the passion. Or as my teacher called it, I was able to bring enchantment to my stories, my characters were real and alive, even when I was only mentioning them.
But I’m not going to rattle on about my writing, I’d rather talk about the concept of what he meant. This enchantment of Joan of Arc, the same thing that possessed Mark Twain. Since then I had come to realize that Mark Twain had been critiqued with someone saying that he was infatuated with Joan of Arc and that he embellished her story, which I have no doubt, considering he was a story-teller. However I find the infatuation and interesting notion, considering Joan of Arc had long been dead before Mark Twain was even born, which means all his knowledge and infatuation was born of the memoirs and stories left about her. Mark Twain fell in love with the perfect partner for a writer: A character.
I know, many established writers would tell you not to fall in love or hate your characters, because it can affect your stories and those characters, but you know what? If you aren’t putting emotion into your own characters, you aren’t really bringing them to life. They are just characters then.
It’s the same thing with a plot. If you aren’t laughing or crying as you write your story, how are your readers going to? When you invest the emotion, it comes out on the page and that’s when your readers connect with that emotion.
And that’s how I settle with my writing. Writing is an emotional exhaustion for me. My heart pulses at thrilling moments, my tears run at heart-wrenching times, my grin is massive at moments of laughter or amusement. And based on the people who have read my story and told me about it, it did show up. I had one person tell me they had to stop and put the book down at one of the part’s of my book because they were like ‘Oh no… no… no…’ and then started laughing since it was at one of those ‘big realization’ moments. Other people have told me they’ve cried at scenes I cried at while I wrote them!
So I guess, write with emotion, if you are going to write at all. That’s probably why I always have hard times writing non-fiction stuff; there isn’t supposed to be emotion in that. Without that emotion though, you just end up with a heartless piece, written for the sake of writing. It’s missing all that allure and enchantment so full in fairy tales.
And that’s a damn shame.
