When this process does work, it works pretty good though. The last story I just posted this week (The Worst Voiceover Job in the History of Forever) was one example.
Another was the story I pulled up yesterday. He has a pretty zany, Douglas Adams-type sensibility, and a gift for weird and wonderful 'what-if' ideas.
The story I pulled up for him got me laughing from the very beginning of reading it again. It was wonderful, because it meant the story was doing its job.
Think about it. What's the point of reading fiction in the first place?
Fiction is an emotional delivery system. It delivers emotion, or it should.
We read to gain experience through vicarious living - to feel emotion. Hence, if there's no emotion in a story, there's really no point to its existence.
A mediocre story that delivers emotion will succeed and be remembered longer than a brilliant gem of writing that delivers coldness and monotony.
Because we read to escape what? Coldness, flat living and monotony.
People (for the most part) don't experience high emotion at their jobs. They don't experience grand passion on those long subway rides and commutes to and from work. They don't always even experience sweeping vistas of emotion with the people they love.
Some people quit their jobs, run off and shoot themselves into space, which isn't a bad gig if you can get it.
And some people run to the library, to the movies, or turn on the television, because they're pretty satisfied with their lives overall and realize that going to the moon also involves being hit by asteroids and freezing instantly in the vacuum of space.
Think of all the lives you're saving by allowing people to read about it instead of risking their own necks. So write with some emotion already!
Where Do We Get Emotion From?
If what I've written raises nothing but boredom and ennui in me, what makes me think others will find themselves breathless with anticipation?
When we write about things we find interesting, frightening, arousing, infuriating, that's a whole different animal. When we find things we love and write about them, or think of ten people or things we hate and kill them off, one by one...it's delicious!
We can't get across an emotion we haven't felt ourselves. If there's no emotion in our writing, you can bet there's no story there either.
So What Do I Do If I Don't Feel...Or If I Don't Feel Very Much?
Boredom is a habit.
Habits are made, and habits can be broken.
Suppose you're writing and you find yourself bored. That happens to me sometimes. What that signals to me is that it's time to get curious.
Instead of entirely abandoning my story, I might look for a new angle. I search for little tidbits of facts around the topic I'm working on, until I find something that wakes up my imagination again. The unconscious mind can get endlessly excited, but only around those things it finds interesting.
If the Loch Ness Monster interests you, how does the Loch Ness Monster relate to your story? If it doesn't, find a way to link them. What is it you like about the Loch Ness Monster? Mysteries? Monsters? Can you link THAT to your story?
We can always try, but it's not without risk.
Ray Bradbury said he turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees for writing screenplays on topics he wasn't interested in. It wasn't for lofty artistic ideals, but for very practical reasons.
If he wrote on topics he couldn't get his unconscious to rally around, he wouldn't be very good, and he would get writer's block from his unconscious mind saying 'I don't like you any more', and his career would then go down the drain.
Every story I've ever written, good or bad, is a story about me at its core. If I wrote about themes that I didn't deeply believe to be true, the story would not only be painful to write, but the feeling of it would come across wrong as well.
Don't fake it. The resulting emotional conflict and potential writer's block isn't worth it.
We Might As Well Be Ourselves...Like We Have a Choice...
And this is not easy to do, because it means embracing all that we are, both 'good' and 'bad'. The garden comes with weeds and thorns, and no amount of yanking will change that.
We can show our best selves, and learn to love the idiosyncrasies that come with being human.
I will never be Ray Bradbury or Stephen King or PJ O'Rourke or Edith Wharton - no matter how much I love them and try to copy them. My own voice always comes out in the end, and both the copying and the originality are part of the process.
I come with limitations...like how much I linger on and love alliteration. It's embarrassing, really. But it's okay.
Some people will love me, some people will leave me. The ones who love me in spite of my lacks are the ones who are looking for something lovely and new, something other than King or Wharton.
Or perhaps I'll just attract people in love with the letter 'l'...
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