To Feel or Not to Feel?
Phew! I (You) made it!
It’s the second to the last day of May and here we are. I am so relieved and glad at the same time that this newsletter is reaching you before the month rolls out. What good would it be to get a May letter in June? Although some do say better late than never but thankfully this is not that.
This month I explore the role of emotion in our writing (and often in our be-ing). Different genres of writing need different degrees of emotion-ality as it were. Business and legal writing being almost a zero on a scale of one to ten. In business, though, the principle of corporate social responsibility today requires an “I feel your pain” ideology from organizations which at a basic level involves some degree of emotional attachment.
I want to speak more about creative writing and how ‘emotional excess’ is a thing we can do well to practice. One of the primary things I tell clients in workshops is to write on something you care about. You get many more words to put on paper which can then be trimmed through editing as opposed to having only few words.
The other idea is to write what you know; something I do not necessarily buy into seeing as people paid to write for a living do not know everything they write about. They do enough research on the subject matter to do it justice and get us interested enough to read. So in a sense, they do write what they know but it is not a knowing borne out of experience.
When you write, dispassion should not factor into the writing because people can “feel” it through the pages as it were. Remember that writing is like a conversation we have with ourselves first before others. Remember that interesting conversations are lively ones. I, for one, hid my interestingness for a while, due to my science background. I wrote then, in the majorly passive voice required of research writing but I recall questioning this with every single paper I wrote.
Own your writing unless you’re writing fiction and even in that case, your characters have to own their dialogues.
From a cultural perspective though, the role that emotions play in our lives and the degree to which we are allowed to express them is a whole other story to be unraveled in a separate and worthwhile missive.
I do know that I have been doing the work to be more expressive in word and in deed because it is helping me come into the fullness of my creativity.
And you know what they say about the universe conspiring to help you once you set your intentions. I have been helped further along in my emotion-ality mission by a friend who gifted me “The Emotion Thesaurus.” This is one of the books listed under resources for the month along with others I found useful along the way.
As we round out Spring here in the United States, I wish for you all my friends, the words of Jack Kerouac —
“No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language and knowledge.”
Take this and know that the world wants to read more of you, the full you!
Will you give the gift?
Resources and Readings
Here are a few resources I found useful for thinking, feeling and writing:
- The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi
- Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett
- Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Pete Scazerro
For children’s book lovers and parents among us, here’s a minuscule list of children’s books that explore emotions in a way young ones will get:
- I am a Rainbow by Dolly Parton
- My Many colored Days by Dr Seuss
- What’s the Worst that could happen by Yewande Daniel-Ayoade
- The Ninja Life Hack Series by Mary Nhin
Please share thoughts about this newsletter and your ‘book lists’ with me at editor@getfabediting.com
“Those who live in (emotional) harmony with themselves live in harmony with the Universe.”
