Emotions, Honesty, and Dangerous Writing
It’s funny how life is sometimes. I’ve always kept my feelings tight against my chest, not letting them out. Very rarely have they peeked through in my real life, which means rarely have they peeked through in my writing.
My fiction has been built around ideas and stories. Surface thoughts that are great to write and (hopefully) read but lack emotion or empathy.
Some of my favorite fiction to read, though, is full of emotion. And I feel it. The great authors are able to inspire empathy, and I’ve always cherished them above other authors.
Tom Spanbauer for example, who I’ve mentioned ad nauseum. His books are full of life. It’s as if he took his heart from his chest and just smeared it across the pages. You can feel everything when you read his words.
That’s because he writes from his own heart. He opens himself up like I wasn’t doing. He takes his own true emotional experiences and fictionalizes the surface points while keeping everything else personal and real.
He calls that Dangerous Writing. It’s dangerous because you have to dig deep within yourself, extract and examine your inner life. What really makes you feel. It’s a scary process to do that and put it on the page.
I’ve always admired that, but I never thought I had anything truly emotional and real to write about. But recent events in my life have made me realize otherwise. I really am full of emotion. I’ve kept it buried for too long, but after much contemplation I’m being honest with myself about my feelings and finally letting them out.
And man, it is a roller-coaster. I’m so full and ripe that sometimes I am bursting with optimism, sometimes laid waste with fear, but all the time I’m happy that I’m being honest with myself. I’m not pushing down these feelings. They are here and I’m feeling them. Pushing them away only gets me into trouble, but listening to them and learning to work with them is going to help me move my life forward.
Like I said. It’s funny how life is. I now understand what Tom Spanbauer meant when he spoke about Dangerous Writing. And I understand how I can take some of my own experiences, hold them up to the light, and turn those feelings (good or bad) into art.
Right now, I’m just happy to experience life fully and unrestrained, and to be more true in my writing. But depending on how things turn out I may start a new writing project, and then I might really understand what Spanbauer meant when he said “People ask me why I write, and I tell them it’s because I can’t cry and speak at the same time.”
