Process and Emotion

I’ve been thinking about the role that my emotion plays in writing.

Now I’m not the overly emotional type when it comes to writing. I’m horribly pragmatic about it. So pragmatic that few things irritate me more than folks asking about Process with a capital P.

(This is different from process, which just means, how do you get your thoughts on paper?)

But there are those who mean Process. And that irritates me because Process implies glamour, genius, and weekly dates with your Muse who gushes about your prose and how you surprise even her.

Capital-P Process is a horrible concept because writing is really just ... writing. It isn’t glamorous and you rarely feel like a genius. In fact, you learn all the ways in which you are far from genius. Your Muse arrives only after you’ve been pounding out dreck for quite some time, hoping to discover the heart of a scene.

Even then, she’s a little tetchy and asks for a cup of coffee because you can’t expect her to look at your work until she’s had a bit of caffeine.

The process (lowercase p, mind you!) of writing isn’t always euphoric. As Nathan Bransford blogged, it's often more about willpower than anything else.

And yet...

I’m learning that the best part of my stories are the ones that engaged me on a deep emotional level. I know I’m on the right track when I’ve gone over a scene a million times, and hit the point where I care.

We all have those scenes that wrote themselves and just sing. But I also have just as many scenes- scenes necessary to the story- that are easy to leave at good enough, at merely well-written. I’m learning to do some unglamorous digging until I find that one aspect that moves me to curiosity, anger, or compassion.

Because, really, if I was bored writing the scene, why won’t a reader be bored reading it? Yes, writing is about the process of getting (and keeping!) your butt in a chair. But the point of that work is capturing scenes that speak to the heart and mind.

Writing should never be an choice between work or emotion. It should always be about both.

So what about you? What role does emotion play in your writing? How do you keep at it day after day until things are just right? I’d love to know how you do it. It’s amazing all the different ways we get our stories on the page.